The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  As Odysseus had Mentor, Jesus John the Baptist, Cesare Borgia Machiavelli, Faust Mephistopheles, Descartes Father Dinet, Schopenhauer’s dog Schopenhauer, and Schiller his drawerful of rotten apples, Mr. Pivner had Dale Carnegie: he and four million other individuals, that is; among whom none dared suspect that (perhaps) Salome’s mother was right.

  Did Damon try to sell insurance to Phintias?

  It is true, Mr. Pivner, sitting under his three-way reading lamp (turned to its highest brilliance), did not plan to sell insurance, nor even a half-million yards of upholstery fabrics (aggregate value 1,600,000) to the youth he planned to meet that evening, nor glean a Packard car from him in return for applying the “principles of appreciation” as the Connecticut attorney did on page 101. He had taken this most worn of his books from the shelf because it inspired in him what he believed to be confidence. As he read there (underscored), “Let me repeat: the principles taught in this book will work only when they come from the heart. I am not advocating a bag of tricks. I am talking about a new way of life.” That was the wonderful thing about this book (“Regard this as a working handbook on human relations; and whenever you are confronted with some specific problem . . .”): if at first its approach seemed fraught with guile, subterfuge, duplicity, sophistry, and insidious artifice, that feeling soon disappeared, and one had . . . “Ah yes, you are attempting a new way of life.”

  True, Mr. Pivner might have read Descartes; and, with tutelage, understood from that energetic fellow, well educated in Jesuit acrobatics (cogitans, ergo sum-ing), that everything not one’s self was an IT, and to be treated so. But Descartes, retiring from life to settle down and prove his own existence, was as ephemeral as some Roger Bacon settling down to construct geometrical proofs of God: for Mr. Pivner, a potential buyer (on page 95) who was head of the Hotel Greeters of America (and president of the International Greeters too!) was far more real.

  True, he might have read the New Testament, and worked out a similar synthesis of Christly conduct and Cartesian method to Machiavellian ends; but how much more direct was this book in his narrow lap: for it was not a book of thought, or thoughts, or ideas, but an action book. It left no doubt but that money may be expected to accrue as testimonial to the only friendships worth the having, and, eventually, the only ones possible.

  “I am talking about a real smile” (Mr. Pivner read), “a heartwarming smile, a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the market place.” An action book; and herein lay the admirable quality of this work: it decreed virtue not for virtue’s sake (as weary Stoics had it); nor courtesy for courtesy (an attribute of human dignity, as civilized culture would have it); nor love for love (as Christ had it); nor a faith which is its own explanation and its own justification (as any faith has it); but all of these excellences oriented toward the market place. Here was no promise of anything so absurd as a void where nothing was, nor so delusive as a chimerical kingdom of heaven: in short, it reconciled those virtues he had been taught as a child to the motives and practices of the man, the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having.

  It was written with reassuring felicity. There were no abstrusely long sentences, no confounding long words, no bewildering metaphors in an obfuscated system such as he feared finding in simply bound books of thoughts and ideas. No dictionary was necessary to understand its message; no reason to know what Kapila saw when he looked heavenward, and of what the Athenians accused Anaxagoras, or to know the secret name of Jahveh, or who cleft the Gordian knot, the meaning of 666. There was, finally, very little need to know anything at all, except how to “deal with people.” College, the author implied, meant simply years wasted on Latin verbs and calculus. Vergil, and Harvard, were cited regularly with an uncomfortable, if off-hand, reverence for their unnecessary existences. (“You don’t have to study for four years in Harvard to discover that,” Mr. Pivner read, with a qualm of superiority, for he understood that Otto had, indeed, gone to Harvard.) In these pages, he was assured that whatever his work, knowledge of it was infinitely less important than knowing how to “deal with people.” This was what brought a price in the market place; and what else could anyone possibly want?

  Here was Andrew Carnegie, who had only four years in school but garnered a million dollars for every day in the year. Here was Cyrus H. K. Curtis, “the poor boy from Maine . . . starting on his meteoric career which was destined to make him millions . . .” Here was George Eastman, who left a clerk’s job at fifty cents a day to pull together a cool hundred million . . . So it went on, with many lesser, but equally enthusiastic examples, each of whom seemed to know little or nothing about his work, but every exquisite channel in the minds of his workers, all expressed in a tone of such intimacy that the reader, if he could not rise (meteorically) to their levels, could take satisfaction in seeing them brought down to his own.

  The carefully selected quotations were impressive, and from as many sources as the success stories, which included exemplary fraud practiced on a bed-wetting child (for his own good) and model deceit practiced on a great opera singer (for his own good). To prepare this handbook on human relations, the author had read “everything that [he] could find on the subject, everything from Dorothy Dix, the divorce-court records, and the Parent’s Magazine . . .” to three popular psychologists. He even hired a man to go to libraries and read everything he himself had missed. They spared “no time, no expense, to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the ages to win friends and influence people.” No wonder, thought Mr. Pivner, reading through these pertinently misunderstood half-truths, that it had succeeded. Here were Barnum and the Bible, Charles Schwab, Dutch Schultz, and Shakespeare, two Napoleons, Pola Negri, and the National Credit Men’s Association, Capone, Chrysler, Two-Gun Crowley, and Jesus Christ, each in his own way posting the way to the market place. Even Jehovah appeared, if only in brief reversal (“Daniel Webster, who looked like a god and talked like Jehovah, was one of the most successful . . .”).

  “You owe it to yourself, to your happiness, to your future, and TO YOUR INCOME!” Reference to “old King Akhtoi” of Egypt (“Old King Akhtoi said one afternoon, between drinks, four thousand years ago . . .”) made Mr. Pivner feel that the author had been right there, at cocktails, with that charming rascal, old King Akhtoi. The Socratic method was marvelously simplified (“His whole technique, now called the ‘Socratic method,’ was based upon getting a ‘yes, yes’ response”): the very essence of cornering, not truth which has no market value (and did, indeed, bring death to the cunning Greek), but a “good price in the market place.” Christ and Confucius appeared, to recite the Golden Rule, and bow out, leaving Mr. Pivner (and four million other individuals) with the clever secret of humility which, carefully used, led the prey in the opposite direction to self-aggrandizement, the illusion of power: in fact, sometimes (when he was tired) Mr. Pivner felt that the sublime secret was to behave like a door mat, to present himself to the world as a cheerful simpleton with no ideas of his own, a good-natured half-wit turning the other cheek, to personify Nietzsche’s idea of the Christian, a congenital idiot with nothing to gain (all the while, however, slipping a half-million yards of upholstery fabric down his sleeve).

  As a matter of fact, he was assured by the author that the only thing keeping him from being an idiot was five cents’ worth of iodine in his thyroid gland (hardly a good price in the market place, even for humility). “A little iodine that can be bought at a corner drugstore for five cents . . .” Indeed, the general tone of the book was one of humility, a complacent and ungainly sort perhaps, proportioned as it was to the camel passing through the eye of the needle.

  Mr. Pivner thumbed through the pages, glancing at the familiar chapter headings, Fundamental Techniques in Handling People . . . Six Ways to Make People Like You . . . Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking . . . and his head nodded. He was very tired. In the background, unattended, the radio
poured out, subdued, the Reformation Symphony. Why so much attention, so much time spent on this book resting in his narrow lap? Mr. Pivner found safety in numbers; any publication with a circulation of a million reassured him, and in a land where mental diseases tolled more people than all other human ills combined, a circulation of four million was more reassuring than anything else could be: for every twenty-five literate citizens over the age of fourteen, one had bought this book, not to guess at how many single dog-eared, underscored copies had circulated among the remaining twenty-four. Assuredly then, it was more than safe; it was an integral part of life around him, those who sneered notwithstanding (for they too were forced to share his life, to be won and to be influenced, no matter their faiths, their aspirations, no matter their reasons for courtesy, their grounds for love, how could they presume to distinguish what they offered from what they were given?); and those who decried and denounced it might be condemned out of hand as dangerous at best, bitter, ungrateful at the least, failing not virtue (which has no definition and no country) but that conspiracy of self-preservation known as patriotism.

  The tic, which came in Mr. Pivner’s lower lip just left of center when he was tired, came now, and waked him to a look of indecisive emotion. It would not stop, but pulled his lip down in quick throbs, as though he had abruptly been asked a question whose answer he knew, and feared to give. He looked suddenly at his watch. He raised it, and held it to his ear. He stood up (still holding the book, open) picked up the telephone, and dialed O, —I’d just like to know what time it is, he said. (—Do you want the time bureau?) —No, I just wanted to know if you had the time, please. (—I’m sorry, we’re not permitted to give out that information . . .) He hung up, and looked at the radio, waiting. The Reformation Symphony made him nervous, as all such music (called “classical”) did, as the word Harvard did; but sometimes he was struck with a bar of “classical” music, a series of chords such as these which poured forth now, a sense of loneliness and confirmation together, a sense of something lost, and a sense of recognition which he did not understand. It must be time to take his medicine, before he left to go downtown.

  The symphony continued as he left it, and went into the bathroom. He preferred that music to which he did not have to listen. It was only the human voice on the radio that stopped him, that raised his head in expectation, as though it were about to impart something of great personal significance, to him. Indeed, that was always the tone in the voice, disembodied; and still listening, expectant, he would sit back, and wait. He had been laughed at, by someone who said, —But you don’t listen to that stuff? Why do you let it bother you? and of advertising in print, —But you don’t read that stuff, do you? What do you let it bother you for? What was this anomaly in him, that still told him that the human voice is to be listened to? the printed word to be read? What was this expectant look, if it was not hope? this attentive weariness, if it was not faith? this bewildered failure to damn, if it was not charity?

  The room was filled with the strident ring of a telephone bell. It shivered the metal sails on the man o’ war, brought forth an undisciplined tinkle of broken glass, and a frantic shade of movement concerted in seizure: breathing the hoarse aspirate initial of greeting, waiting, listening, everything stopped:

  —Hello! This is Meribeth Watzon, speaking for the New York Telephone Company . . . the radio confided without changing the expression of its features, grill and knobs and a lighted smile; and what shadows moved in the room were slow about retiring, those that remained borne still on the walls including the black shape of the cradled telephone where he had dropped it dead, for almost a minute.

  Mr. Pivner stood quivering. He’d just broken his last container of insulin. It was too late to go out and return.

  —Friends, don’t take my word for it. You owe it to yourself to get the details of our free offer. And listen, friends, the next time you . . .

  True, the janitor in Mr. Pivner’s office building did not yet call him by his first name. True, the divorce rate had almost doubled since the publication of the book before him. True, he read in headlines of men in the governments he helped to elect, men who might not know their work, but they certainly knew how to deal with people, men who strode forth from the front page in expensive clothes, smiling, the hand raised in bonhomie, on their way to appear before investigating committees interested in their remarkable incomes, withering the smiles which had brought a good price in the market place.

  “. . . dashed off in a moment of sincere feeling . . .” As he put the green scarf around his neck, his lower lip pulled, and he tried to hold it tight. —Friends, you owe it to your own health, and your family’s . . .

  And King David, what did he say in his chamber over the gate, after Joab had dispatched his son still hung in the branches of the terebinth tree?

  Mr. Pivner pulled on his overcoat, and put the needle and syringe into a pocket. He turned off the radio, courteously, waiting until the voice had finished a sentence. He left the book of selective quotations out on the table, next the photograph album. True, one must select; impossible to quote all that Shakespeare ever wrote, to prove a point he never embraced; impossible to print the words of Rosalind, when she said, “But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

  Mr. Pivner stood in the doorway for a moment, looking back into the small apartment before entering the world of loss which came when he turned off the light. He remembered years back, when he had bought that book; and in the doorway, still lighted, a fragment of gold arrested him, gold now like the double eagle of the nineteenth century, bored as those words had pierced him, with the sound of the counterfeiter’s drill, hollowing out the coin, and filling it with lead, and sealing it so, a very difficult counterfeit to detect. He had bought that book hoping to win friends. He wondered if other people had bought it for the same reason.

  The button at his hand clicked, the place disappeared in darkness, as the days of faith were gone, all gone into the dark, gone to earth under Fort Knox, and in the cemetery at Hatton Gap, Arkansas, where, a bare half-century before, Moses had polled six votes in the presidential election, and John the Baptist, three.

  And the Buddha?

  And the Gainas?

  And the morning? and the evening? Morning, evening, noontime, night: what was the shape of Mr. Pivner’s soul? round, or oblong? And its atoms, worth as much as iodine atoms? worth five cents? Or were they of a different kind: round, smooth, and especially mobile?

  And a good price in the market place, say . . . thirty pieces of silver?

  —Whhhhassafuksamatter? This delicate question went unanswered, for the man who asked it was alone on the street corner. He waved his rolled-up newspaper at no one, and then stood smiling. —So. You wonanswer? Ascared? he challenged. The light above his head changed, on one side, from red to green, on the other from green to red. A bus approached. It stopped, and so he got on it. He put his fare in the box, and stopped halfway down the aisle, —MERRY CHRISTMAS!

  No one answered. —Sgoddam too bad, he said. —I got on a funeral hearse. Snobody’s funeral, snobody to bury. Merry Christmas in a cemetery. He sat down, and opened his newspaper. After a few minutes of patiently staring at the words there, he asked the man across from him, —Wherzis bus go?

  —I don’t know, said the other.

  —Fine thing, you don’t know. I congradulate you. You’re the first man I’ve met in New York’ll admit he don’t know something. Congradulations. He extended a hand which swung emptily in the air between them. The bus stopped, and as his neighbor got off he called, —Look out, don’t break your leg or we’ll have to shoot you . . .

  He sat back and stared at the newspaper. Across the top of it were printed chapters from Genesis, which was being serialized for the holiday season, as a public service. —I’ll be damned, it’s the Bible, he said loudly. —You get the Bible in the newspaper, he said, addressing the man who had sat down across from him,
next to a lady with a baby in arms. —Whdyou think of that. You know why that is? He looked up and down the bus. —Sbecause any of these fine people would feel like a jerk reading the Bible in public, they’d be ashamed to. But if they’re oney reading the newspaper, that’s all right. Merry Christmas! You don’t have to go to college four years to know that. Am I right? Am I right? he demanded of this man across from him.

  —Yes, Mr. Pivner said, lowering his eyes from the card above the man’s head, and raising them again, to read, UNBELIEVABLY REALISTIC SEE FOR YOURSELF 8.00 PER CARAT

  —Merry Christmas! the man threatened.

  —Merry Christmas, Mr. Pivner answered him. He was very tired. He had stopped at a drugstore to buy his medicine, but not taken the time for the injection, fearful of missing his rendezvous, planning to take his injection in the men’s room of the hotel, when he got there. Still, at this critical instant, his training did not fail him. He recalled chapter nine (“Wouldn’t you like to have a magic phrase that would stop argument, eliminate ill feeling, create good will . . . ? All right. Here it is . . .”) —I don’t blame you a bit for feeling as you do, said Mr. Pivner, recalling the words of John B. Gough, quoted on the following page (“. . . when he saw a drunken bum staggering down the street: ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ ”). Then he had a strange sensation on one leg. He drew it toward him, and looked, as the woman lifted the baby away from the large spot on his trousers. —You can’t hardly blame the baby, can you? said the woman. Mr. Pivner stared at his trousers as he stood up. The tic in his lip pulled it down in quick throbs, and he said nothing.