Boswell Read online

  Boswell

  A Modern Comedy

  Stanley Elkin

  For Joan, for Philip, for Zelda, and Diane

  And for my father

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Part Two

  Part Three

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  A Biography of Stanley Elkin

  Part One

  I

  Everybody dies, everybody. Sure. And there’s neither heaven nor hell. Parker says hell is six inches below the ground and four above the head. So we walk between, never quite managing to touch either, but reassured anyway because heaven is by two inches the closer. That Parker! What difference does it make? Everybody dies and that’s that. But no one really believes it. They read the papers. They see the newsreels. They drive past the graveyards on the outskirts of town. Do you think that makes any difference? It does not! No one believes in death.

  Except me. Boswell. I believe in it. I believe in everything. My metaphysics is people, the living and the dead. Ladloc, the historian, says that history is the record of all the births and deaths for which there is a record. History is dates. John Burgoyne was born in 1722 and died in 1792. Louis XVI: 1754–1793. (Do you suppose Louis knew of Burgoyne’s death? Do you suppose he said, “Ah, he’s gone now, the old campaigner”? Do you suppose he suspected he’d be dead in a year himself?) Shakespeare: 1564(?)–1616. Caesar: 102 (or 100)–44 B.C. History. But do you notice how as one goes back the birthdays become less certain while the year of death is always absolute, fixed? Do you think that’s an accident? Listen, death is realer than life. I saw a sign on U.S. 40 in Kentucky. It said REMEMBER YOU MUST DIE. I remember. But I never needed the sign. I had my own father. My father was a healthy man. Content, vigorous, powerful, well. But when he died, he died of everything. The cancer, the blindness, the swollen heart, the failed markets. But even that, the death of one’s father in a hospital room, the kiss goodbye inside the oxygen tent, isn’t enough for some people. Even if they stretch a point and come to believe in the death of others, they refuse to believe in their own.

  I remember reading in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat an interview with the murderer, Braddock, when I was a kid. Braddock, waiting in the deathhouse, told Edward Renfrue, the reporter, “When they pull that switch, they’ll be pulling it on the whole world. Nobody will outlive me. Nobody. The warden. The president. You. My girlfriends. Nobody. Everybody dies when I die.” He could believe in a fantastic short circuit that would end the world, but not in his own mortality. Do you suppose only a murderer thinks that way? Go on, it wasn’t until they pulled the switch that Braddock understood what it was like to be a murderer. Then he murdered everybody, all of us, the born and the unborn. And don’t you think he didn’t close his eyes two seconds before he had to just to make sure? Just so as not to be proved wrong? Listen, even my father, my own father, when I kneeled beside his bed in that white white stinking room, looked at me and there was blood in his eyes. Why, he’s angry, I thought. He’s mad at me.

  I’m different. I remember I must die. It explains everything. People who do not know me well—people who don’t keep files on me, as I do on them (5 by 9 cards with the person’s name and dates and a brief identifying phrase)—think my interest in them is faked, self-interested, that I’m a social climber on the make for everybody. The truth is I’ve a sort of chronic infidelity. It’s not that I have a disappointment threshold lower than most, or a higher hope. It’s just what I said: congenital infidelity. I am not a lover but I am like one. I am a strategist, an arranger, a schemer, but there is nothing sinister about me, nothing sinister even about my plans. It’s as though I had devoted my life to arranging surprise parties, and, indeed, there is something celebrational in many of my contacts. I have in my files an engraved invitation in a raised, wonderfully ornate script:

  Mr. & Mrs. Richard Montrose Shepley

  Would Take Infinite Pleasure in Your

  Attendance at the Marriage

  Ceremony of their Daughter,

  Celia Rochelle,

  To Mr. Leon Randolph Wesley,

  The Son of Mr. & Mrs.

  Mark Hawthorne Wesley…

  All those parents, still living, that striking girl, that marvelous young man, all those beautiful flowers, that sunny Sunday, that handsome church, those honored guests. That is precisely the note I aim for.

  But who keeps Boswell’s file? Persons in institutional relationships to me? Government agencies? Department stores? Junk mailers? My book clubs? What do they know—a name, an address, a vague notion of my income? I at least have seen most of the people in my files, have been in their neighborhoods, have tasted the cuts of their meats.

  Who has been in my neighborhood, who has tasted my meat? I have. I have. Who keeps Boswell’s file? Boswell does. I do.

  In a way I have never been sure who my first celebrity really was. It depends, as do most things, upon what one is willing to count. I can remember, for example, going to radio programs to see the announcers, men in shirtsleeves, their watches handsome on their wrists. One of these could have been the first, then. Von Zell or Norman Brokenshire or Alec Drysdale or Dell Sharbard or Bill Goodman or Westbrook Van Voorhies. Fame was quantitative, disembodied, in direct proportion to how many heard the voice, bought the product, listened to the name. It had to do with the number of thousands of watts of a given station, with fortuitous time-slots, the ability to overcome static. (Even so, it was what they did before airtime that fascinated me—their deep-decibeled, low- throated “damns,” their nervous coughs, the occasional, luckily glimpsed, shiny spit that sprayed off their expensive lips.) I took the Radio City tour five times before I realized it was a failure. To see Harry Von Zell five times was, finally, redundant. I was jaded. I had climbed that mountain, been in that state capital, seen that wonder of the world. Even at first, then, experience was horizontal. What does a kid know? Everything, everything.

  I stopped the tours. For me the scheduled appearance of a famous man was of no more account than the scheduled appearance of a famous planet. If it were available, it was of no use to me. You couldn’t buy a ticket of admission. It was of no use to go to theaters, concerts, ball games. Experience was something oblique, not crept up upon so much as come across. When I read Moby Dick I at last had a name for it. The gam. Two ships meeting accidentally in the middle of the ocean.

  What opportunities, then, for the landlocked, for a child? For the time being I made do with the crank, the exotic, with people who, self-scarred by characters which were forever too much for them, were perpetual butts and trailed their shameful fame like cans tied to dogs.

  But the first really famous man I ever met was Dr. Leon Herlitz, B.Pg., Berlin; M.Pd., Baghdad University; Ph.D., Lucerne. He’s dead now, of course. He leaves no survivors (none of us do), so I suppose I’m free to tell what I know. I have a feeling, however, that many already know his secret, that he instilled confidence by placing himself at our mercy, by making himself repeatedly vulnerable, exposing his heart, so that after a while it became merely a gesture, too automatic to be real superstition, a physicist touching wood. It was endearing though, no matter how many times he must have done it and despite the disparate personalities to whom he must have exposed himself. It was a testimony to—no, more —an endorsement of the really gentle needs of human beings that no one has ever used the information until now—saving only Dr. Herlitz, of course, whose information it really was and so who was entitled to use it.

  He was an amazing man, Herlitz. I’m not being sentimental. Of course he wa
s my first famous man; of course we all have an unreasonable loyalty toward our first celebrity, what Randolph calls “the hypnostatic effect of the primal evening star.” I realize all this. Nevertheless, Herlitz was a truly remarkable man. (I pay for having had Herlitz as my first great man, I pay for that. What expectations he created in me about great men!) Wasn’t he already an old man in 1922? When I first met him years later he was ancient. Who could count his years? I remember Ebbard Dutton’s article in Sports Illustrated on how Roger Maris got into baseball. Dutton referred to Herlitz as “the Satchel Paige of Psychologists.” It is awesome to think of the stages of the man’s career, the active influence he’s had on our culture from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up through the development of the hydrogen bomb. One doesn’t know whether to call him an historical or a contemporary figure. Why, he must already have been an adult when he put Freud into psychiatry in the last century; a man well past middle age when during World War I he acted as Chief of Personnel for the German army, personally assigning, on the basis of intricate tests and interviews, each German officer above the rank of lieutenant to his particular army, sector, regiment, battalion, even company. Bhangra, the Indian war historian, says that Herlitz, single-handed, “was responsible for the long duration of the war. The Germany army was, in essence, the most signally ill- equipped, ill-prepared, anachronistic army ever to fight a major war. Only the circumspect appointments and assignments of officers made by Dr. Leon Herlitz can account for the effective participation of the Germany army in the First World War. Herlitz raised the Department of Officer Personnel into a deadly instrument of warfare. It is not to be doubted that with even a mediocre army supported by even mediocre equipment Leon Herlitz could have conquered the world.” So he was already old when he talked Lindbergh into flying the Atlantic and ancient when he counseled the French Existentialists.

  In truth, of course, Herlitz was not really a “placement counselor.” His official title at Harvard during the last years when he developed the famous classes of 1937 through 1945 (what an official Department of Health, Education and Welfare survey calls “collectively the most successful group of college graduates ever to enter the fields of Science, Finance, Government and the Arts”), was “Psychological Placement Officer.” Herlitz didn’t counsel. Herlitz commanded. When he was through with you your life was fixed, charted. He raged through your ideas about yourself like a violent wind. He was a kind of scientific gypsy, reading your fortune, your future. Like no other man who ever lived he knew what was best for people.

  I encountered Dr. Herlitz during the famous “last phase.” It was after he voluntarily left Harvard in 1945. A man of great age, of extraordinary age, he who suspected and knew so much must have suspected his death. The old forget their deaths as easily as men forget old debts (we think we are forever quits with the world, all obligations canceled or unincurred). They have lived so long that they have developed a kind of hubris which even age and infirmity cannot defy. That’s why they seem so serene; it’s pride. But not Herlitz. It is my belief that a terrific anxiety overcame him and that this anxiety was less for himself than for his world. How could he be sure that the most promising men of their generation would continue to pour into Harvard where he could counsel, command, shape what might otherwise have been their unfulfilled lives? He hit upon the idea of a world tour. (Leonard Zeiss, the geriatrician, is convinced that for a man of his extraordinary years, Leon Herlitz was remarkably sound physically, but that in subjecting himself to “the Tour” he made himself prematurely vulnerable to the ravages of old age. It is a genuine tribute to Herlitz’s humanity that he was so loved by the scientific community. After all, to Leonard Zeiss, the geriatrician, Herlitz could easily have been just another old man. What was it, if not love, which guided Zeiss’ hand when he concluded his report in The Journal of the American Medical Association on “Herlitz As An Old Man”: “It was the Tour which took him. He might be alive today had he stayed on at Harvard. Leaving there must have been for Herlitz like her journey with Conway beyond the valley of Shangri-La was for Lo-Tsen”?)

  On his tour he went chiefly to the high schools, sometimes notifying them only hours before his arrival. In that last phase he ranged all over the world, hitting each continent except Africa, where he hoped finally to spend the most time but which he never reached due to his tragic death. (Lane, the sociologist, is just one scientist who directly attributes the generally backward condition of Africa to the fact that Herlitz did not get there in time to guide its potentially great men.) At any rate, Herlitz ranged the world. In each country the government itself put its most rapid transportation at Herlitz’s disposal. Within the borders of a given country he was flown gratis at top speed wherever he wished to go. (Indeed, in the last days he became something of a political football. Governments looked upon Herlitz as a sort of natural resource, and, jealous that other countries might use his services to their disadvantage, did all they could to delay his departures. I make no charges, but it is well within the bounds of reason that Western Civilization may have been in rare accord when it caused these delays. Motivated by the white man’s traditional fear of the black man, there may have been a gentlemen’s agreement to “Keep Herlitz out of Africa!”)

  To whatever city or town or hamlet Herlitz came, there would be assembled its children. These he would pass before, looking into their faces for some sign which only he could recognize. Before some individual child he would stop, scrutinizing the face carefully, and, still operating on some principle which only he understood (it was not brilliance; often quite ordinary people were singled out by Herlitz for special attention), he might point toward the child and say something to an aide who walked beside him with a clipboard. In this way he managed before he died to look into the faces of many of the world’s children. Frequently, if he found no individual “subjects” (Herlitz’s term), he might categorize an entire group before he went off. “These kids, farmers!” he might say, or, “Barbers.” “Realtors,” he might say, “the rest, salesmen.”

  So I met Herlitz when I was still young and he was, perhaps, the oldest man I had ever seen.

  Why did he pick me? There was no question about it, not even the hesitation and the staring I had heard about. I was not even standing in the front row. There were five lines of us stretched across the outside entrance to the assembly hall. I stood in the fourth—to the side. Yet that man picked me out as though no one else were there. Had what really happened been that I had picked him out, trapped him with my eyes? What does that mean? A seventeen-year-old with seventeen-year-old empty eyes to hold the eyes of a man like that? Impossible! What was it in my face? What sign of intelligence or hint of destiny that had escaped teachers, relatives, friends, that had slipped by even myself who looked for it, who peered nightly into the bathroom mirror as one looks into a microscope, had he seen as clear and there as a light in a window? What hint of character, gleam of heroism, finger to plug dikes, nose to sniff smoke, eye to see flame, mouth to shape warnings, had that man come upon when I, conscious but careless of finger, nose, eye and mouth, had, in the awful anonymity of my youth, signed my raffle tickets academically, with no thought to win? I felt like the thief on the Cross, shaken by an unuttered “Who, me?”, my very unlikeliness (but not that unlikely) suddenly the stamp of my identity. My first thought as Herlitz stepped, no, pressed, through the ranks, shouldering aside in his ruthless, old man’s way the more and most likely in order to reach me, was, Why, he’s a fraud.

  But then, of course, he couldn’t be. After all, even if -picking me were a stunt, the ultimate act of arbitrary power, transmogrification of frog into prince, why, at least he could see prince somewhere within the rolls and folds of frog flap. Anyway, this is what I thought then, when I still lived behind my adolescent pimples and worried (even after I had fathered a child) whether girls would kiss me. But in a way, that kind of skill still amazes me. Any sort of insight does. I am mystified, too, by music coming from portable radios, and
by the novelist’s induction of character through a description of his hero’s bone structure. I remember one book I read where everyone in a family was against a proposed daughter-in- law because when they met her they all felt she looked sickly. I can never tell when someone looks sickly. Broken bones, yes, because that’s surface. Blindness, arthritis, mumps and measles. Beyond that I cannot go. Some can. I can’t. Maybe that’s why I must talk to people, ask them leading questions, put them in contrived situations, turn the pressure on. I want to hear them yell for help. That I can understand. I suppose Herlitz saw all this. That Herlitz!

  What else could he see? My clothes? I dress like a sergeant in civvies—seven-ninety-five slacks in Webster’s-New-Collegiate Dictionary-cover blue, wastepaper-basket green, woodwork brown; two-ninety-five white short-sleeve shirts, or white short-sleeve shirts with speckles of color; brown Toby Tyler shoes. That I was an only child? Really, this is embarrassing. It is not my method to speak of myself—or rather, of my past. I find I can barely remember it. At any rate, since I cannot speak uncritically if I speak at length, I will speak briefly.

  My name is James Boswell. My parents are dead. My mother, poor woman, died when I was seven and left me to be raised by my father until I was ten. Then he died. My father left me his taste in clothes and his sister with whom I lived until I was fourteen, when she died. A sister of my mother brought me along until I was sixteen. She died and I reverted back to my father’s side, where a bachelor uncle took me the rest of the way.

  I am thirty-five years old, but I have a son twenty. He was born out of wedlock to a fifteen-year-old girl who died bearing him. Her parents took my child in exchange ’ for their own. He knows me and who I am.

  That kind of childhood gives a kid a pretty solid taste in funerals, but not much else. Of course, a real knowledge of funerals is no small thing. In a way, it qualifies one for life. It gives one, too, a certain sense of transience. Maybe that helps to explain my fascination with famous men. The famous are not transients at all, and this is odd. They spend so much time being guests one might think there would be something impermanent about them, but it’s not so. Of course they die, but I don’t mean that. Everybody dies. And all this wailing about Ozymandias is a pile of crap. They remember his name, yes? They get it right in the papers, no?