Boswell (29 page)

“Too old, I said. “I thought you were about forty.

“Appearance and reality, sonny. The real key to the culture. Intrigue, secret letters, what the President really said, what really happened. Inside stuff!”

“That’s true,” I said. “That’s very true.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I believe,” I said, “that certain people are in control of everything that happens, and that unless we find out about them we can’t know about ourselves.”

“Infant,” he said, “I know about myself. I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist. Too old for the really important things in the field. It’s changing. There’s Coca-Cola in the jungle. It’s all different now. The new stuff is about the death of the old cultures. It’s a de-mystification process. There are medicine men at Oxford, chiefs in Harvard Law School. You get to a place you think is still raw and the UN has been there before you. They’re singing folk songs. They’re not wild. Do you understand that? They’re not wild any more, all those savages. They’re just like everybody else now, or soon will be.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s awful.” He closed his eyes. “There ought to be killing. There ought to be blood. Murder. Atrocity. My beauties have their violence intact. It won’t be all that easy for the new men. They could have their tape recorders smashed.” He laughed softly.

“You talk as though you were retiring.”

“It’s too hard,” he said. “Tuberculosis is the anthropologist’s disease, did you know that?”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he said. “TB and the various jaundices. I’ve had them all. And six wives. Can you imagine that, a little shrimp like me? I’m a very licentious man,” he said softly. “I became interested in anthropology because of the color photographs of the bare-breasted native girls in
The National Geographic.”
He looked at me to see if I believed him. I did.

“What the hell,” he said, “it was a life. If you waste it you waste it.”

“You didn’t waste it. You’ve got the Nobel Prize.”

He laughed.

“You’ve got the Nobel Prize, Morty.”

“For work I did eighteen years ago,” he said. “Anyway, what has that got to do with it?” One prize. I’m a man of appetite. I need committees in all the world capitals; I need clamor.” He called the waitress over. “I’ll have some more tea, please, sweetheart,” he said. His elbow was against her thigh. “Have you read my books?” he asked me.“
The Proper Study of Mankind.
Chicago University Press. Four volumes. Six ninety-five each. The proper study of mankind. I failed, do you know that? Don’t breathe a word to Stockholm. I failed. I tried to get at their savagery, their violence. Somehow it all came out sweet. The worst things sounded like the acts of naïve, unsophisticated children—like those cartoons in
The New Yorker
where the cannibals roast the missionaries in big kettles. I’m a satirist. No one understood that. Have you read my books?”

“No, Morty, I haven’t yet.”

“‘A popularizer.’ That’s what the professionals call me. ‘Not serious.’
The Journal of International Anthropology
said that. ‘Not serious.’ I’m serious, I’m serious.

“Of course,” I said. “I’m serious too.”

“It’s the impulses,” he said. “I’ve lost my energy in impulses, but even the impulses never interfered with my seriousness. It was what I really saw in the jungle. They could do it… I don’t know… gracefully. They made impulse seem calm. Not me. I still had the other thing— the civilization, the good manners at the last minute. Still, I have leaped before I have looked. I have pounced on my life,” he said bitterly. “Now I pay. I pay and pay.” He groaned.

“Morty?”

“What is it?”

“What is the proper study of mankind?”

“It’s man,” he said. “At his worst.”

“No,” I said. “It’s men at their best. I’m a kind of anthropologist, too. Morty, you’re a great man.”

“I am not finally a public person,” he said.

The waitress brought our check and this time Morty didn’t even look at her. He poured the last of the tea into his cup and smiled. “Look at me,” he said, “I won the Nobel Prize less than a week ago and I’m sitting in a fly-specked café drinking tea with some kid I don’t even know. Always I get the kids. What’s your name? I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Boswell,” I said.

“‘A popularizer.’ Well, maybe so. I’ve always been very interested in the education of the sorority girl. Maybe all my professional life I’ve been writing to the chubby knees in the first row. None of my wives have been Jewish, do you know that? I mean, what the hell kind of a record is that for a man who can’t hear a dialect story without getting sick? Christ, what am I doing here, Boswell? I should never have left that party.”

I moved uneasily in the booth. “We had to get out of there. After what Gibbenjoy said, how could you stay?”

“What Gibbenjoy said. I didn’t even hear him. Impulse. Always impulse.”

“Morty, he’s nothing.”

“What do you know about it? He’s a rich, generous man.”

“He called you a little Yid.”

“What am I, tall?”

“Morty.”

“Forget it. I’m
persona non grata
now.”

I was a little alarmed. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so worried about Gibbenjoy. This wasn’t a third wind; it was a fresh wind in a new race. “What difference does it make?” I said.

“No difference,” he said. “No difference. It’s finished. Impulse. Again impulse.”

He pushed the teacup away from him suddenly. A little brown tea spilled over onto the table. “What happens to my project now?” he said wearily.

“What project, Morty?”

“It was my opportunity. I won the Nobel Prize. Now I could have earned it.”

“Morty, what project? What is it?”

“Gibbenjoy was going to give me thirty thousand dollars,” he said.

“What? Why? What for?”

“For my project. Before it’s all changed. I was going to show the UN what they were really dealing with. It’s finished,” he said.

I couldn’t think. I had cost the man thirty thousand dollars. “The prize money,” I said. “You’ve still got the prize money.”

“Alimony,” he said hopelessly, “a few lousy suits.”

When we left Morty insisted on paying both checks.

November 5, 1953.
—
4
A.M.
Philadelphia.

Yesterday and tonight, the strangest thing.

Morty called the night before last and I went with him to a party in his honor at the apartment of one of his grad students. Almost everybody except myself was from the University, and almost everybody except Morty was as young or younger than myself. Kids. Mostly grad students but some undergraduates and a handful of freshman girls.

I had the impression that none of them, though they call him Morty and not Dr. Perlmutter or Professor, really like him. They are embarrassed, I think, by his friendship, and out of some queer propriety disapprove of him both as a teacher and as a man. Morty does not deal with people professionally. After seeing him at that party I can imagine him striking up morbidly personal relationships with the very savages he had gone to study. I can hear him referring, in the manner of the very rich or the very old, to intimate situations, to his four brothers and their wives, to his days as a student, to his love affairs, using always first names, as though the natives might be expected to respond as he himself had responded. I don’t know what Morty’s stories would sound like in the savage babble of some South Seas or African or Indian tongue but I know that he would be able to put into them all his absurd, vulnerable humanity.

“These are good friends,” Morty insisted to me as we watched them dance in the dim apartment. “They’re my students and my friends. I like young people.”

“Do you, Morty?”

“Certainly,” he said. “I like young people. I like everybody who hasn’t made it.”

I had told Morty my story when I went to his apartment the night after I had met him. I had wanted to tell him about the trouble I had caused him, about my lie, but he was so resigned and even pleasant about his loss that I never did. For all his volatility, Morty is apparently an optimist, with that solid, purblind sort of faith that defies all the bad breaks. One wants to shake such people, to rub their nose in their troubles. (I can barely abide so profound an advantage as my clearer vision over my friends gives me.) The temptation always is to defile, to mar sublimity with some deft slash. How many times in museums, when the guard is not looking, do we seek to touch some ancient painting, to press our thumbnail into a dry crack and shatter some vulnerable square inch of the painter’s immortality? I have left my finger marks on the shellacked surfaces of masterpieces; I have unraveled the corners of priceless tapestries. It is a constant temptation to record obscenities in our neighbor’s wet cement. It is the same with opposite conditions. We lie to the sick man, puff some friend’s failure. We are exterior decorators.

All of us had a lot to drink. Morty, who is a slight man, does not hold his liquor well, though in many ways he is keener drunk than sober, quicker to sense offense, more concerned with people’s reactions to him. He began to talk, first to individuals and then to the room at large. Morty does not have to force people to listen to him. He knows so much and despite his naïveté has experienced so much that one is eagerly a part of his audience. Only when he talks about his concern—himself—does the interest of others flag. Yet he seems to sense this, for he brings out his subject in a subtle, almost deceitful way, and only after he has finished do we realize that what we had thought was a professional anecdote is really a revelation about Morty himself, a confession.

As he talked people took up casual positions around the room. Most of us continued to drink and two or three couples danced, though one of the dancers had turned down the phonograph. A few people maintained their own private conversations, but these were pitched almost subliminally beneath the level of Morty’s. The result was a comfortable, almost soporific buzz which gave us all, I think, a peculiarly distant sense of
toleration.
It was as if interest persisted while wonder slowly died. I had the sense, too, that at last we had come to terms with ourselves and with each other, as though we were sitting there in the room naked, as indifferent to each other’s nakedness as to our own. There was something only vaguely sexual in all this, a sense of infinite availability, as though each of us had been given a kind of promissory note. It was like bountifulness in dreams. There was so much and all time to contemplate it. Perhaps this is what Morty means when he says he likes young people, for it is chiefly among young people, I think, that this illusion of plenty is generated.

“When I was a young instructor,” Morty was saying, “before I got my degree, I went out to the Midwest. Maybe you saw my book,
The Flatlands.
The title is a pun. What did I know, a punk kid from the big city? Well, I wasn’t trusted. I had been hired by the University of Nebraska for a turn in summer school—I’ve been a teacher in fourteen state universities and seventeen private institutions, five of them abroad, where my reputation, let’s face it, is greater than in this country, and I’ve never stayed any place more than three semesters running in my whole career—which, incidentally, is the secret of how I manage to produce so much. Stay in the night schools and the summer sessions, you young teachers, and compete for the temporary chairs here and abroad. At that time I had no record, a very scanty bibliography—I was a kid. Probably the only reason they took me on at all was that in May—it was 1933—I had come back from the Pizwall camp in Tespapas on the Upper Amazon and I had these pictures—phonies, incidentally, which I bought in Hollywood one time, stills from some
Tarzan
picture. In one shot you could barely see Elmo Lincoln’s leg. Well, who needs pictures? To tell you the truth, I don’t even bother with a camera any more. A tribesman, I don’t care where he’s from, is the craziest son of a bitch in the world if he thinks you want pictures of him. He’s always got to gild. Explain to him all you want is an ordinary picture and he turns into a silly whore—pardon my French. He puts flowers where he’s never put flowers in his life, or beads in his nose, or he climbs into skins or something. These pictures in the magazines give me a laugh.

“But Nebraska could get me cheap, and after all I had been with Pizwall—though frankly, at the risk of talking disrespectfully of the dead, I never cared much for his system of collecting data. Anyway, even if I was cheap, and even if I
had
been at the Tespapas digs, I was an unknown quantity and Nebraska didn’t feel it could trust me. Not only was I Jewish but I was an easterner, and in those days—it’s no secret—I was a Communist, too. I would be again. I was no damned nineteen-thirties liberal. I would be again if conditions changed, but what’s the sense of revolution if you’re not revolting against intolerable conditions? I’ve seen intolerable conditions, and these aren’t intolerable conditions. Anyway, the kind of conditions I’m talking about have almost nothing to do with economics and never did. They have more to do with the culture itself, with national attitudes. I was in Rome once—this will illustrate what I mean, I think—and I was having lunch and wine in a sidewalk cafe—”

“I’m getting out of here,” I heard someone say. “This is just the way he teaches, too.”

“—in the Piazza del Popolo and suddenly I became conscious of this woman. A big woman carrying some sort of a bundle. At first I thought she was carrying laundry. She had the thick forearms of a laundress, broad powerful shoulders, colossal legs, but when she came close I could see she was carrying a baby all wrapped up in a kind of sheet. She was young—it’s hard to tell a gypsy’s age, but she looked about twenty-five and was probably closer to nineteen. In the same hand that she held the baby she had a beer bottle. She had this wide rent in her dress, no underwear on at all—I could see her strong ass. I couldn’t figure out the beer bottle—for a beggar, that’s lousy publicity—until I saw there was a little milk in it. Now why a strapping thing like that wouldn’t breast feed
I
don’t know, unless it was the poor woman’s concession to the rest of us, not to make a
brutta figura
by showing a tit in public. I remember it was a nice day; it had rained earlier, but now the sun was very bright and all the streets were dry. Rome and Lago Torvu in the Pacific are the only two places I know where absolutely brilliant afternoons follow cold, dreary mornings. Well, as I say, she was a beggar. The kid was a prop, of course, and could just as well have stayed home with the beer bottle and the mama’s pregnant little sister, but probably the woman felt she needed it for her begging. She came up to all of us. She didn’t miss a table. She’d go up to each of these fine diners sitting in the sun in the café and she’d hold out her hand. Well, they didn’t even look at her. I mean, it was as if this woman
and
her baby were invisible. They looked everywhere else—out of the corner of your eye you could see them sizing up all the other people in the café—but they ignored her. I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think they
saw
her. It was as if I, the only person watching her, were having some sort of a private vision. She stood there with the baby and the cruddy milk and asked for money. I mean she begged— she really
begged,
if you understand me. ‘For the sake of the baby,
signore
and
signori,
five lire. Five lire.’ A penny is six lire, you know. Well, it was amazing. They didn’t even refuse. It was as if not only hadn’t they seen her but they couldn’t hear her, either. Finally she’d get tired and go to the next table. She didn’t seem mad. No expression. It was as if she couldn’t see them, either. It took her ten minutes before she got to me. I gave her all my money. About fifteen dollars, I think. That’s shit about how they’ll take it and just buy drink for the lazy gypsy fucker that lives with them. What the hell. Milk, booze—need is need. After the way those others treated her I couldn’t do enough for this woman. I asked her to sit down with me and share my lunch. I couldn’t eat after that anyway. She misunderstood. She thought I was trying to buy her when I gave her the money.