A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Hell—defined as the most unpleasant place its inventors can imagine—is consequently the best depository for human bile and vindictiveness. It is also the goblin that is going to get us if we don’t do as we are told. It exists, but only in the chambers of the human heart. When it comes to envisioning Hell, details are never lacking. Heaven, on the other hand, is always vaguely rendered. Nearly everything is white, like a Richard Meier museum. In Elkin’s account, of course, it must contain celestial choirs, gates of pearl, and streets of gold. Aside from the chance to walk over hills as woolly as sheep, we shall see few fields of wheat or barns of hay or arbors heavy with grape—no signs of work—perhaps some shining cities, sugar plum fairies, or big rock candy mountains. I think that is because, if we were to give it its due as the pleasantest place its inventors can imagine, we would be embarrassed by the common quality of our wants—women, sweets, silks, wine, luxurious surroundings—so we make no mention of being able to gorge ourselves without ever being sated, of being perpetually in heat so we can be repeatedly pacified, hitting the opium pipe to benefit from dreams better than sleep, or enjoying the opportunity to peek below the balcony while various injuries are inflicted upon our enemies—to watch without weariness, remorse, or fear of reprisal. To go to Heaven is to be put in charge of Hell. It is to get unevenly even. In this regard, Dante and Milton were the last living divinities.

  These days, just to show how much things change even in Heaven, many immortal souls as well as a raft of angels, previously unemployed for ages, if not left to twiddle during eons of idleness, have rewarding roles on TV, and bodies given them for the occasion that the heavenly would long to have if longing were allowed up there. Of course, what do the heavenly have to do but meddle in earthly affairs?

  Actually, when political and religious leaders try to con other people’s children into going to war or committing suicide for them, the suckers’ rewards are often described in just such embarrassingly hedonistic terms and often include the offer of camera coverage. If God were on our side, He would warn us to be wary of causes that ask us to die for them. If we have not read The Living End, we might complain that God should do Himself what He wants done instead of handing out assignments. He is the progenitor of the illocutionary act. After “let there be light,” “let there be peace” should be easy, “shut up” a snap.

  Because the first panel is given over to our common saws, Elkin reins in his language, renders his narrative’s actions with the broad strokes of low comedy, and forms his dialogue from a continuous stream of clichés. Irony is thicker than Christmas pudding. The tradition mandates this approach. My Bible dictionary is quick to affirm it for Job, one of Ellerbee’s precursors.

  Two prominent features appearing throughout the book [of Job] may offer keys for one’s hearing of the divine speeches. These features are the use of irony and of questions. Ironic speech abounds, in which the obvious sense is subverted and another implicit sense emerges through them. Often the device serves to mask and reveal dissenting views in the garb of conventional wisdom, which is thereby left intact for the imperceptive but exploded for the keen listener. (Harper’s Bible Dictionary. Paul J. Achtemeier, gen. ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1985.)

  Ellerbee, who is given no other name than Mister, has been going through a bad patch in his and his family’s fortunes. He will be a Job without a job description. Elkin’s rhetoric, of which he is a stair master, makes fun of our daily recital of complaints. Nothing is so trivial that it can’t be worth a good hand-wringing. There is (1) the loss of loose change (2) between the cushions of other people’s couches; there are (3) bottles broken (4) on which a deposit was receivable; there are (5) other coins that phones or vending machines refuse to return, as well as (6) expensive tickets that Ellerbee cannot use because he must be out of town or is iced up or snowed in, and (7)—a characteristic step—there is his habit of overtipping in dark taxis: all this before we reach the first landing, a level of hell set aside for reversals in the stock market.

  For openers: Ellerbee’s house is reappraised for tax purposes at a lesser value, which is a lucky break, but the house promptly burns down. His Minneapolis liquor store is robbed and two of his clerks are shot—one killed, the other crippled, and, oh yes, brain-damaged to boot. A worse fate is to befall Ellerbee. He is a good and kindly man. He feels obliged to help both the sick and the dead—against his wife’s wishes.

  “Idealist,” May said. “Martyr.”

  “Leave off, will you, May? I’m responsible. I’m under an obligation.”

  “Responsible, under an obligation!”

  “Indirectly. God damn it, yes. Indirectly. They worked for me, didn’t they? It’s a combat zone down there. I should have had security guards around the clock.”

  Ellerbee is done for. Hell is his destination. But there is worse to come. At his clerk’s funeral, the fetching widow kisses him on the lips. His body responds with a boner. Can she be counted a neighbor’s wife? Can a boner be a case of covetousness? Ellerbee is toast. For sure, Hell is where he’s headed. But there is worse to come. He starts up another store. This one is in St. Paul and it is called High Spirits.

  The business flourished—doing so well that after only his second month in the new location he no longer felt obliged to stay open on Sundays—though his promise to his clerks’ families, which he kept, prevented him from making the inroads into his extravagant debt that he would have liked.

  If it took three strikes to be called out in this game, Ellerbee would be, but he needn’t have stayed open on the Sabbath, or had what Elkin has elsewhere called a soft-on, for taking God’s name in vain was whiff enough.

  Our author is on theologically sound ground here. God’s laws are to be followed to the letter. Some readers will remember the fate of Uzzah, the son of Abinadab, who, while accompanying the Ark of the Covenant as it was being moved from his father’s house, put out a saving hand to keep the Ark from tipping when it bounced about in its cart on a rough road, and was struck dead on the instant his unsanctified fingers touched it. Nor was it Ellerbee’s fleeting desire that did him in, but the boner, however fainthearted, because it was a real, if covert, act. The widow’s name, after all, is Mrs. Register, and Ellerbee might as well have signed in. Moreover, he failed to keep the Sabbath holy when he kept his store open, even if his intention was of the kindest, because intentions of any kind don’t count.

  The letter killeth. The complaint’s been made—by some of the wiser prophets. But the Divine Commandments are modeled on Natural Law. Had Uzzah touched a live wire, he would have died regardless of his character or his designs. The water that fills a drowning man’s lungs does not ask for his résumé. It would be a mistake to think that regulations regarding adultery were of less concern than those involving a loss of life, for the laws, being those of God, are all equal, are frequently expressed as taboos, and can be summed up in a word: obey. In time, since there were lawyers abounding, these laws multiplied, until there were so many only the scribes had any clear idea of what they were or what they meant. Anyone interested in keeping the Sabbath holy might have felt the usefulness of an itemized list. This multiplication, especially of ritual requirements, was an enormous source of power.

  Perhaps literature’s most brilliant representation of the strength and glory of biblical law can be found in Kafka’s novella In the Penal Colony. The commandant of the colony is especially proud of his instrument of punishment, which literally etches upon the condemned person’s body the letters that spell out his crime, putting period to both life and sentence with an emphatic spike. This officer disapproves of the new commandant, who apparently supports the spirit of the law, values love and forgiveness over justice, pleads insanity or good intentions, introduces degrees of importance and other niceties, as well as endless legal delays, just as the prophets did, dematerializing Israel’s Kingdom to Come into something within, circumcising the heart, and paradoxically, by pushing sin past act and intention into instinct, ensuring tha
t we are all guilty of something … or other … all the time … dirty-minded though clean-shaven. There were little sins and big sins, forgiven sins and deadly sins, crimes of passion, conscience, and calculation, sins of omission and commission, ancestral curses, private as well as public vices, with Love and Justice so tightly wound around each other’s throats, neither could breathe or cry. Ellerbee fell victim to beliefs prominent in earlier ages, still active, however, in this one; for these are times when times are out of joint, with people living in different centuries, not just in different places.

  Ellerbee will be shot and killed during another holdup—a stickup of his new St. Paul store. An angel of death will accompany the robbers but be taken as a bystander because he just lurks. According to conventional wisdom, the angel of death is an escort service. We are compelled to infer that they—the powers that be—expect Ellerbee to be murdered. They don’t do the deed themselves, however, though they have sent an emissary. Rather, they allow a pair of klutzes to perform that service. One is an ace abettor named Ladlehaus, whom Ellerbee will meet in Hell when he gets there. The other is a gunsel whom Ladlehaus, a blabber, calls Ron. In the meantime, Ellerbee goes up to Heaven, as souls do, and is overwhelmed by the rightness of it all: shining cities with shining streets and a populace of families advertising their reunions in the after-world with radiant faces. Supernaturally, there are angels attached to wings larger than they are, God drowning in aura, halos gleaming like lightning bugs, not a beard untrimmed or a wig askew. Inevitably, there is ambrosia, manna, and music. Ellerbee decides, as he and the angel beam up, that seen from afar, Heaven looks like a theme park. Then, having arrived, he thinks it still looks like a theme park. Strikes four and five. In the World of Law, your actions put you at risk; in Love City, your unspoken opinions can take you down. Heaven has always resented having been designed by Disney.

  So Ellerbee catches it from both sides, as though the Old and New Testaments were the closing jaws of a vise. But there is trouble from yet another direction. In Hell, where he has been abruptly sent, he learns from the main man Himself still another reason for his plight. Since he was an orphan, he has never had the chance to honor his father and his mother as he ought, and the filial pieties he has practiced toward his adoptive parents don’t count. Strike six.

  Life may not be fair, but afterlife is more so. Ladlehaus, accomplice in crime, the pettiest of crooks, lives to be nearly a hundred and dies “an organic, unbleached death like something brought back from the Health Food Store.” He does go to Hell, though, and even gets to see God on one of God’s Ubiquitous Training visits. It is Elkin’s opportunity to have some fun with the “omnis”—the four great properties that conventional but also theological wisdom give to God: the all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere-present, and perfect Being. God admits that “Omniscience gives Me eyestrain. I’ll let you in on something. I wear contacts.” But readers who enjoyed Philosophy 101 can point out to the Almighty that His omnipresence makes eyestrain unnecessary. He is a part of everything that happens, so of course He knows about it. God also complains that “omnipotence—that takes it out of you. I mean if you want to work up a sweat try omnipotence for a few seconds.” You mean trying to create a rock He can’t lift? the quick student invariably wonders. Logic is the devil’s pitchfork, and when Elkin has God claim to have squared the circle, we know that either the deity or His draftsman is fibbing. There are limits to omnipotence, and that is one of them. Contradiction is the careless thinker’s catastrophe.

  The “omnis” are enemies of one another, but God’s perfection is an intolerable nuisance. Elkin’s God is arbitrary, mean, selfish, ruthless, and vindictive—where is the goodness in that?—moreover, He makes mistakes which His perfection and His knowledge can’t permit, even if He does say “oops!” His indifference to the feelings of Mary (engendered), Joseph (cuckolded) and Jesus (sacrificed), as Elkin ruefully renders the foursome, is appalling. And are the sufferings of Hell His sufferings, as well? Because He’s there in every lick of the burning lake, in the agony of every hamstring pull. I wag my philosopher’s finger at our author, but Stanley has an answer that will satisfy me when—at the conclusion, of course—he offers it.

  With a song in its heart, theology marches on. The reader will doubtless remember those frequent movie scenes in cemeteries when, before a simple cross or forlorn stone, a husband kneels to commune piously with a loved one prematurely lost. When he is not vowing revenge, he is seeking forgiveness for having fallen in love again, or he needs some advice, his nerve annealed, his blunted purpose pointed. The focus is soft, the wind calm, the moment in the movie crucial. Sometimes the lady’s image is superimposed; sometimes we hear her voice in the hero’s head; sometimes he speaks out loud, as if they were in conversation; sometimes a brief breeze will move the flowers he’s brought, indicating a ghostly presence. These clichés represent conventional wisdom, but in the central panel of this triptych, called “The Bottom Line,” Elkin has it his own way—as always.

  God has mistaken Ladlehaus for a smart-alecky back talker and flung him impulsively out of Hell to be retombed in what is now, because eminent domain has grabbed the graveyard, a high school athletic field in St. Paul—“his consciousness locked into his remains like a cry in a doll.” Everywhere in Elkin’s work the reader will run into electrifying lines like this one, so perfectly, so powerfully accurate and apt, so directly yet desperately phrased, that what might have seemed a bit of kidding around can only be taken as the somber chuckling of a malign fate.

  “For he felt that that was where he was, somewhere inside his own remains, casketed, coffin’d, pine boxed, in his best suit, the blue wool, the white button-down, the green tie pale as lettuce.” There he manages to catch the attention of Quiz, the school’s caretaker and groundskeeper, when that not-nice man finds that his wife has medicated his lunch by adding oatcakes. Oatcakes is the word that reaches his grave through the cleat-scarred ground, and by chance arrives at the end of an eloquent monologue by Ladlehaus in time to seem to be the answer to its question: “What’s the bottom line, eh?”

  Quiz has heard Ladlehaus but hasn’t fancied hearing tales of woe from a lot of lawn. He’s the John Wayne who should be communing with this stone, and not a member of the supporting cast attending to the whining of an afterthought burial plot. So he begins a series of charades designed to give the body below the belief that St. Paul is now at war with its twin city. It is a characteristic of all of Stanley Elkin’s work that at critical moments reality is roughly shoved aside and lengths are gone to as if they brought you to a cottage on the Cape or a castle in the Balkans—steps are more than taken; steps taken are not returned; the shoes worn on the feet that took the steps are put back in their boxes and shelved according to wearer weight and tread size—lengths are measured off like cloth in order to compel the customary to give up its hypocrisy—so that what has passed for real grows larger than life, like a six-ton pumpkin, a modest personal quirk is decked out like a float on parade and preceded by a band just off a steamer from New Orleans. The bubble we live in is blown till it bursts. That is to say: All Hell breaks loose.

  Ladlehaus is regaled. His sacred ground gets peed on. With the help of an unruly bunch of boys, Quiz puts on war games. There is a brisk session of Q and A. Then Quiz and his wife convince Ladlehaus he isn’t dead but on life support. The pair threaten to pull the plug. And no one involved—Quiz, the Quiz kids, Quiz’s spouse—question the phenomenon—after all, they are familiar with the phrase “a voice from the grave.” A world in which children play where the corms of death are planted makes Ladelhaus, who can feel nothing by definition, shudder despite his incapacities; he, who “had lived in Hell and seen God and who had, it was to be supposed, a mission,” gets the willies; he who “represented final things, ultimates, whose destiny it was to fetch bottom lines” feels some qualms, because, as a consequence of their frolics and charades, “appearances had not been kept up” and his grave was littered with “candy wr
appers, popsicle sticks, plugs of gum.” But after all, if you get sent to Hell for doing business on the Sabbath, there is nothing strange in those who are buried cursing little boys who vandalize, picnickers whose leavings litter the cemeteries, or lovers who experience their delicious little expirations nearby the stones of those who know death at some length and by and large.

  The mock triumphant final panel, “The State of the Art,” is a painting of an unhappy Holy Family. Here all pretense of following conventional views is abandoned for the sake of the tough questions, though some of the questions are conventional enough if asked of you or me—as, indeed, they inevitably are: Was Jesus lonely as a child with no brothers or sisters to play with? Jesus does sit at the right hand of God, but on a hinky-dinky stool. However, there are unique questions, too: What must childbirth be like for a virgin? No picnic. And a life without what we call love? No picnic, either—nor for her husband, who isn’t even a figurehead, fuming forever at the object of fun he’s been made. Jesus resents having been offered up, and, in addition, mourns the loss of His worldly life. Joseph can’t stand this imposture of a kid who claims to be the Messiah. Jesus wears jewelry celebrating His sacrifice, but He is “a surly savior,” and cherishes His limp. God seeks forgiveness of the Forgiver for the murder of Quiz, whom He smote in a fit of annoyance when that man interrupted a concert by the high school band with his complaints about the talkative ghost who’s inhabiting his grounds. Nonetheless, God does not ask to be shriven for the death of a boy whose playing God so liked He ordered him to Heaven. There are many such revelations. However, the conclusion of all things is too satisfactory to be spoiled by some secondhand account, for this is a story with a punch line—a profoundly sound one, in my opinion. One page of The Magic Kingdom says this: