Boswell (34 page)

Lazaar has convinced the doctors he is sane. His tests show no self-destructive tendencies.

December 3, 1957. New York City.

The doctors tell me they will have to let him go tomorrow, that they can’t hold him on my charges. What do I do?

December 4, 1957. New York City.

As soon as they release him today Lazaar will kill himself. They won’t let me near him. I have been told that if I try to meet him at the hospital I will be arrested. He has to be watched—someone must be there to overpower him. There is no way of saving another man’s life if he really means to kill himself. Life can be spilled in a minute. With a lousy kitchen knife. With a jump from a building. Or in front of a car. Or a subway. Or by running, head down, across a room and into a wall.

Is Lazaar dead? The genius? The maker of systems? Is Lazaar dead? Has he killed himself?
And me not there to see it?

December 5, 1957. New York City.

Lazaar does not answer his telephone.

December 6, 1957. New York City.

When the phone rang this morning I leaped toward it from my bed. (I am like that. Even in normal circumstances. A ringing telephone, a knock on the door, makes me… not nervous—what bad news can there be? a bachelor, an orphan, disaffiliated—so much as compulsively responsive, insanely anxious to please. Here is something I can do, some way I can be of service. It doesn’t even occur to me that the call will change my life. What can change anybody’s life? We’re not sweepstakes winners, we’re men. I cannot bring myself to disappoint strangers. I have this meaningless humility in small things.) I was hoping, of course, that the call was from Lazaar. I wanted to hear him say, “Boswell, I am alive and I am reconciled to life.”

I dropped the phone onto the floor. At once I knew it could not be Lazaar. On the rug, by my bare foot, there was the sound of a girl singing love songs in the morning.

“Yes.”

Music.

“Please, who is this?”

“Jimmy, did you see the
Times
yet?”

“Nate?”

“Who, then?”

“Nate, what is it?”

“Did you see the
Times?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s a little item about your pal. The genius. Some genius.”

“Lazaar?”

“Jimmy, the company you keep!”

“Lazaar?”

“Yeah. Him.”

“Nate, what is it?”

“Wait a minute. I’ll read you.” He left the phone and I could hear the girl again on Nate’s combination hi-fi, stereo, TV, tape recorder, AM-FM, Short Wave, Long Wave, Living Theater, Puppet Show.

“Jimmy? Wait a minute. Simmons, turn that thing down. I’m reading from the
Times
to my friend. Jimmy?”

“Come on, Nate.”

“All right, don’t rush me. If you took a classy paper like the
Times
you wouldn’t have to depend so much on your friends. I’m beginning to read, Jimmy. ‘Dr. Herman Lazaar, Lyman Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, was released Tuesday from Bellevue Hospital. In the hospital for extensive psychiatric tests and observation, he had been taken to Bellevue by an unidentified companion who alleged that the Brooklyn College professor had repeatedly made attempts on his own life. Hospital officials, satisfied that Dr. Lazaar is not suicidal, have discharged him.

“‘Dr. Lazaar’s work in philosophy, while comparatively unknown to the general public, is highly esteemed in professional philosophic circles. He is the founder of “Yeaism” and “Nayism,” two systems of philosophic logic which, starting from identical premises, lead to exactly opposite conclusions.’ How do you like that? The guy tried to kill himself. Go get a college education… Jimmy?”

“I’m here.”

“You didn’t forget the blast over at the place tomorrow night, did you?”

“No, of course not, Nate.”

“Many famous chicks. Movie stars, the works. Bring your autograph book.”

“Sure, Nate.”

“How do you like that? An ‘unidentified companion.’ The creep’s probably queer. Watch yourself, Jimmy.”

“My eyes are open, Nate.”

“Look, come over a little early. We’re playing Frank’s new record. A premiere.”

“Thanks, Nate.”

Nate said ring-a-ding-ding and I said ring-a-ding- ding yourself and we hung up.

I do not miss the significance of Nate’s call. He was warning me, telling me to choose sides. He knew Lazaar was going to try to kill himself because I told him about the threats. I ran to him with them. What the hell is the matter with me? I sit with Nate and gossip about Lazaar; I sit with Lazaar and gossip about Nate. I make offerings to each of them.

Nate doesn’t approve of my having friends like Lazaar. He says, “If they can’t hit high C, if they don’t do imitations, if they ain’t actors, if they don’t have prime time on a Sunday night, if they ain’t SRO at the box office, if they ain’t show biz, Jimmy, they’re bums.”

I tell him there are many great men who aren’t in the business. “So let them cure cancer,” Nate says. “They got to make it with the public.”

When I tell Nate that I cannot come to some party of his or meet some celebrity, he is hurt. He thinks I’ve changed. Sometimes I see him look at me with a kind of awe. It is the way one looks at an old pal who has just announced he will take holy orders. This is touching, but Nate, who is made for awe, is nervous if it’s a certain kind. Still, he will never turn on me. His is a world, finally, of permanent loyalties. A commitment once made among men who do not yield their trust easily is a commitment for life. There is something sappy in this and sentimental and incredibly noble. Nate should smoke cigars, heel wards, play poker with appointees on the take. He has the soul of the tinhorn; he confuses graft with friendship, conspiracy with love. Perhaps this is why he is so fond of me. I am on the take. I take Nate’s meals, his introductions. I give him nothing at all in return, and this pleases him. Perhaps my gossip is an attempt at independence, an effort to even the score. I notice that Nate takes no pleasure in hearing it. He thinks I’ve changed, and he fears change. That is why he bothers to warn me; he is defending himself.

But I know what Nate cannot know.
I have not changed.

Boswell is Boswell is Boswell. His truth is that the personality is simply another name for habit and that what we view as a fresh decision is only a rededication, a new way to get old things; that the evolving self is an illusion, fate just some final consequence. I have never surprised myself, come upon myself unaware. Always I know it’s me.

I do not want to have to pick between Nate and Lazaar—not because I would have to betray one or the other (I talk as though Lazaar were still alive), but because I need both. I am like some small businessman enough ahead of the game to open another store. If I have a new type of man in my collection it is not because I have changed, but because the old techniques have worked.

Lazaar is an instance. It cost me almost thirty dollars in long-distance calls just to get Lazaar’s name. I put in person-to-person calls to the chairman of eight Departments of Philosophy. (I will stint on lunches, wear old clothes, live in cheap, cheerless rooms, but a campaign is a campaign.) Before they came to the phone I had honed the precise edge of brassiness I wanted.

“Professor, this is Jim Boswell. I’d like to put you out on a limb for a second.”

“What’s that?” (Exactly.
Confusion.
Confuse and conquer!)

“Well, professor—say, what
do
I call you, sir? Professor? Doctor?”

“Either. None. Mister. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“How about that? Well, as I say, this is probably a toughy, and maybe you think it’s a silly question, but I’ve got my reasons. I’m not at liberty to say what those are just now, of course.”

“What is it?”

“I want to know who’s the best going?”

“I am invincible. Who can stand against me? Had I sounded less stupid the man would have been more guarded. But I came at him sounding like the world— vulgar, probably powerful. None of the chairmen even asked for my credentials. My name (I never falsify
that)
couldn’t have been more than a blur of sound, but it was enough. Nor did they ask my reasons. It is enough when someone who always has reasons comes at you.
The long distance,
the chairman was thinking. He was thinking endowments, chairs.

“What I want, Doctor, is the name of the king, the champ. Who’s the heavyweight in your bunch? I don’t know what you’d call him, the wisest man or something, but the guy who’s doing the best stuff.”

And Nate thinks I’ve changed, gone fancy. Nate is a fool. I do
my
imitations too. All time is prime time.

Almost all of them said Lazaar—and in under three minutes.

I branch out. I know more people. I use the universities extensively now. There is a big market for the famous in the universities. I add mathematicians, musicians, astronomers, biologists, historians, writers-in- residence. (See journal entries for months of February through May, 1955, for October 12, and October 23–30, 1956 and for December 2, 3, 7, 8, 1956,
et al.)

There are ways. Oh yes, ways. A ninety-day excursion ticket takes me from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again. I know more campuses than a textbook representative. What do I need? My wardrobe serves. There’s a simplicity in it. You want? Take; the world is open. The frontier is all around us. Like the sky. Don’t talk to me about class, station, opportunities. Don’t make excuses. Show me a door—I will knock on it for you. Lead me to a gate—I will ring the bell. Walls? Don’t give away your age. There are no walls in a democracy. Something there is doesn’t love a wall. Boswell doesn’t love a wall, but in extremity it can be scaled. These are men, just men, even as you and I.
Only
men.
Merely
men. The ferocious declination of the infinitive to
humanity.
That’s how it is; I didn’t write the language. (Of course I don’t say it’s easy to do what I do. A few aren’t made for it. The lamb will not lie down with the lion.)

I rip through their campuses, smelling of streets and streetcars, smelling of the line at the check-out counter, of the super-marketplace, of the world. These people are no match for me. What do they know? They think Red China should be admitted to the UN. They believe in fairness, civics, rights—the closed shop, the Negro vote, the happy man. Utopians! Yet there is a deep democracy in me, too. It is the democracy of giving no man quarter. I will not patronize the enemy; I will empty both barrels into him every time. I will waste advanced techniques on him in a gratuitousness of slaughter.

This year I attended some lectures by a theologian in the Harvard Divinity School. An expert on God. A very big man in the field, influential, respected by atheists. I sat in the front. (I always sit in the front; the principle of no quarter again.) I let him have the first round. Then, ten minutes before the bell was due to sound for the end of the class, as he was describing the relationship of Man to God, I began to fidget and look uneasy. I have a way of looking disturbed (it’s my size) that is felt across continents. In that small room, among those rapt faces, my restlessness was like something out of the whirlwind. Nothing snotty, you understand—no vulgar mouth sounds or laughter or anything like that (though I have, on occasion, used laughter, too; one time, at the University of Chicago, I laughed like a hyena when a Nobel physicist wrote his formula on the blackboard). Just a kind of profound uneasiness as though I were wearing new underwear and hadn’t taken out all the pins. People next to me frowned. Some said
shush
(though I had made no sound). At last, inevitably, there was a look of helplessness from the lecturer himself.

“Is something wrong?” he asked innocently.

“Is something
wrong?”
I exploded (as though I might yet have kept silent had he not been the one to bring it up). And then, softly, remembering where I was and who I was and who he was and who He is, “Forgive me. I’m sorry, sir. Please forgive me.”

“Well,” he said, “you looked so—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Please go on.” I held up my pencil as though what he said next had to be a note.

The theologian began to speak once more. I waited for him to make his first point before allowing my anguish to return. By this time he was lecturing directly at me. I produced my most difficult effect. There was pain; there was mute, martyred, superior knowledge; there was fear; there was sadness; there was the young man’s flushed squeamishness in the presence of senility. All this. Everything played across my face like an intricate sequence of waters in a fountain.

It was too much for him. “Please,” he said. “I must insist that you reveal at once what you’re objecting to. If I’ve made a mistake in dogma or interpretation I’d like to know about it. We’re all of us students here.”

“Do you
mean
that?”

“Of course. Yes.”

“Well—”

“Yes?”

“Sir, if you’ll permit me, it seems to me that the implicit lesson in
all
religions, the essence of the ecumenical pronouncement, is—”

The bell rang. I shrugged sadly and left the room. He wooed me. He followed me in corridors, Boswell’s little lamb. He kept his office door open all day hoping for another glimpse of me. I strolled by maddeningly. He came up to me in the Yard and spoke to me; I answered politely but with reserve. We had coffee together; he bought.

Eventually he began to suspect that I was playing with him and I moved to consolidate my position. At the beginning of the next class I asked permission to make an announcement.

“I would like to apologize for my lack of humility last time,” I said softly. “It is of course unforgivable that a person like myself—I’m from the Pennsylvania coalfields—who ought to thank God just for the privilege of hearing a wise man like the doctor here, could dare to bring even a moment’s anxiety to such a saint.” I watched him squirm. “Yes, a saint,” I repeated. “I would be bereft of hope for my arrogant soul except for my knowledge of God’s infinite mercy. Thank you.”

When he began to lecture, the students couldn’t keep , their eyes off me. They had to see how I was taking it. I was taking it like an angel. I looked like God was scratching my back.