ess ays

∏IN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & Brooklyn, New York

Copyright © 1992 Stanley Elkin
Published by Tin House Books 2016

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Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elkin, Stanley, 1930-1995, author.

Title: Pieces of soap / by Stanley Elkin.
Description: Portland, Oregon ; New York, New York : Tin House Books,
[2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020365 | ISBN 9781941040379 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3555.L47 P5 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020365

Printed in the USA

Interior design by Jakob Vala

www.tinhouse.com
To Joan
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

PART ONE
Performance and Reality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Plot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Acts of Scholarship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
The Law of Average. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
What’s in a Name?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
The First Amendment as an Art Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
The Muses Are Heard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
An American in California.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
At the Academy Awards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
The Rest of the Novel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Pieces of Soap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

PART TWO
A Preface to the Sixties (But I Am Getting Ahead of Myself.) . . . . . . . . 223
Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1980. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Foreword to Arthur Schnitzler, Plays and Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
A la Recherche du Whoopee Cushion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Introduction to Early Elkin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Introduction to The Six-Year-Old Man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Introduction to The Coffee Room. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Foreword to Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
My Father’s Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
My Middle Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304
Why I Live Where I Live. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Where I Read What I Read. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
A Kinsey Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
My Shirt Tale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Summer: A True Confession. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
The Mild One. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
My Tuxedo: A Meditation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Three Meetings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Some Overrated Masterpieces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
 INTRODUCTION
By Sam Lipsyte

If you didn’t know any better, the guy on stage looked pretty jolly,
a kindly, balding, white-bearded fellow in a wheelchair (“MS,” an
audience member here in this packed hall at Brown University
near the end of the 1980s whispered), an avuncular gent ready to
embrace the crowd with warm wit. I knew a little bit better, but
when he opened his mouth what rumbled out still shocked and
mesmerized, and if you took a second gander you saw now in
this moonish middle-aged man a sly ferocity, a devilish need to
provoke, to push, like his notorious creation Push the Bully. He
sure as shit wasn’t Santa Claus, and he was going to let you know
it with astonishing lyricism and perversity.
“My name is Stanley,” Stanley Elkin began, reading from an es-
say (“What’s in a Name?”) collected in this book. A simple enough
declaration, but what followed (go read the opening, I’ll wait) was
a long paragraph about what somebody named Stanley might do to
your child, a riff more funny, disturbing, and poetic than any three
steps of the tongue down the palate, any humdrum life lights or
loin fires. The piece soon veered away from first-person molester
 STANLEY ELKIN • x

hypotheticals, but not before words like “fork” and “grimes” and
“bespittled” had lodged new resonances in my noggin.
I’d read him, in fevers of bliss, already, a few of his novels and
short stories, always dazzled by his language and humor, but it
was another thing to see him in person. He was all sprezzatura on
the page, his circus utterances unfurling with seeming ease. Up
in the lights you could sense struggle, agon, some inner grimace,
probably more to do with physical discomfort than anything.
Certainly he knew how to read his prose—he was maestro and
orchestra at once—and it was the music I’d come to hear.
I had just recently been privy to this idea that some artists give
aspiring ones “permission,” and I had adopted that feeling about
Elkin. Reading his books, you realized how lazy most writing is,
how instead of just skating in circles on the rinky-dink ice of dull
utterance, you could try to put life into every line, to see every
clause as an opportunity for some kind of close-up magic, a pi-
geon of felt actuality bursting from your fist. (“Try” was—alas, is,
for everyone but Elkin—the operative word.) But the fireworks
weren’t just for the sake of the spectacle, or the trick. It all need-
ed, in some marvelous way, to connect to that larger entity, the
show. Elkin once laid down what he called “the rules” in a radio
interview: “Form perfect sentences and flesh these sentences out
in high structures of imagination.”
Elkin did so, again and again, in novels like The Living End,
George Mills, The Magic Kingdom, and The Dick Gibson Show, as
well as in short stories like “A Poetics for Bullies.”
That night in Providence he was part of a largish gathering of
writers, all friends of a sort, invited by the great Robert Coover.
These were the so-called postmodernists, those in step with John
Barth’s famous essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” purveyors of
an exciting anti-realism, though such appellations would grow more
 PIECES OF SOAP • xi

and more meaningless. Still, in those days, the particular camps in

contemporary American literature seemed fairly well demarcated.
Later they’d dissolve into the mist, but that’s another story.
Also on hand were William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and
William Gass, a colleague of Elkin’s at Washington University
in St. Louis. Gaddis was dapper and anxious, Gass was a shaggy
wizard, Barthelme charming, and if they constituted some kind of
pantheon (and they did to me), Elkin was a gruff but fair-minded
war god, assuming the war was one waged against the forces out
to stifle daring prose, deep comedy, and an honest (complex, con-
tradictory, horrified, celebratory) sense of the world.
Pieces of Soap is pure Elkin, and something different as well.
While there’s no real separation on the sentence level between
Elkin the fiction writer and Elkin the essayist, he does employ,
like a wrestler (see his memorable grappler Boswell), a variety
of new grips. Elkin explores many themes, including literature,
movies, sex, small-town comforts, big-time diseases, and many
other topics quotidian, epic, or, mostly, both. He understands
the Shakespearean stakes and poetry in a breakfast spread, or, as
in the title essay, a collection of “wrapped motel, hotel, airline,
railway, and steamer soaps.” Elkin does not keep his pieces of
soap for Proustian remembrance, and, he says, he “writes more
from the grave robber’s viewpoint than the collector’s.” He trac-
es his soap-collecting compulsion to the past (which Faulkner,
one of Elkin’s permission-givers, and subject of his Ph.D. thesis,
reminded us is not even past), to his traveling salesman father.
Once Elkin starts using his soaps, they become talismans against
mortality, or at least a way to measure the life left to him.
Elkin also makes incisive forays into theories of craft. He
reveals the true nature of plot (it’s “isometric”) and novels (“For
conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most
 STANLEY ELKIN • xii

decorative of the blunt instruments”). Elkin’s thoughts on fiction

are as brazen and astute and often as entertaining as his fictions.
His adventures in Hollywood, described in two brilliant pieces
here, are as much about himself, and America, as they are about the
celebrity-industrial complex circa 1989. By now a “cripple,” he falls
out of a hotel shower, “my pale Missouri body falling from grace—
only no one falls from grace so much as from its absence . . .”
“Schmuck,” his connection, his old Yale acquaintance, TV
honcho David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood) calls Stanley, for
resigning himself to a shower without grab bars. Sometimes El-
kin is a schmuck. He makes great art from the fact. Often he leads
with his wounds. He lures you, traps you with them. Not that
you mind, of course. It’s part of the magic, the show. (“Never the
winner of my anecdotes . . . but the fall guy, the whiner take all.”)
The schmuck also confesses to trying to be an asshole, and losing
the game, as when he attempts to humiliate a former Democratic
Party nominee for president for what Elkin perceives as phony
courtesy at a cocktail party. But the old pol handles him perfectly.
Awful for Elkin, but all the better for us, for the story.
Yes, Elkin is funny, one of the funniest ever (radio interviewer:
“Is there any pain or humiliation that is too great for humor?” El-
kin: “No. No, there isn’t”). He was also one of the most serious ever.
He was often amused, but his books were never merely amusing.
Too much was on the line. His vision of society, culture, absurdity,
the stations of the self, the sufferings and charms of the body, were
all too acute for light humor. The title of a recent TV show and
website, Funny or Die, almost has it right. Yet what it misses is
everything. Funny and die is more like it. But also funny and live, in
bigness and in smallness, in sickness and in health, and in the case
of Stanley Elkin, not just live but perdure, beyond life, in some of
the most original and thrilling prose in the language.
 PERFORMANCE AND REALITY

There is in literature an element of what I shall call “crossover.”

In primitive form it is often little more than echo, or allusion, and
is borrowed from one thing and imposed on another for what
might almost be homeopathic reasons, growing a sort of interest,
as money grows interest—lump-sum momentum like a chain let-
ter no one has broken.
We frequently see the crossover in story titles. E. M. Forster
writes A Room with a View, A Passage to India; Bob Coover “The
Cat in the Hat for President.” Joan Didion calls her novel A Book
of Common Prayer, Thornton Wilder his play The Skin of Our
Teeth. Indeed, it isn’t only authors who consciously mine the allu-
sive, magical properties inherent in prior names—inherent after
the fact—history itself does it. “World War Two” is a crossover,
catchy as a tune. Not sequential convenience, mind you, though
that’s certainly part of it, but actual art. So artful and catchy, in
fact, that the one on the drawing boards, if it ever happens, will
be called “World War Three.”
Writers of advertising copy and the editors of popu-
lar magazines are perhaps the most expert, certainly the most
 STANLEY ELKIN • 2

self-conscious, practitioners of this form—and it is a form—with

its values of pun and slogan. It would be an interesting exercise
to examine the titles of the news articles in just one issue of Time
magazine. I’m too lazy to take the trouble, and too troubled to
take the pains, but if I were a better person and had the char-
acter for it, I’m certain that what I would find would be a kind
of cornucopia of recombinant and essentially literary elements—
in-jokes for outsiders.
But whether the source is literary or idiomatic—usually it’s
idiomatic—the intended effect, when it is not merely cute, is al-
ways the same—new wine in old bottles, some recycled but in-
cremental and compounded sense of the world, the lifting of one
occasion to enhance another.
Some years ago, to no one’s particular notice, I thought to call
a collection of bits and pieces from my previous books Stanley
Elkin’s Greatest Hits. I thought it an inspired title. The model was
from the recording industry, an allusion to what, in America, has
become almost a genre—Wayne Newton’s Greatest Hits, Elvis’s . . . :
the habit of reissuing in a new package the popular but out-of-
print blockbuster golds and platinums of established stars. Often
these anthology recordings are promoted in TV commercials with
the note, like a surgeon general’s disclaimer on a package of ciga-
rettes, that it’s not available in stores.
My intentions had been honorable. That is, like all honorable
intentions, they were born out of frustration and despair. All I’ve
ever wanted, as I tell my friends, is to be rich and famous and
to live forever without pain. My title, I felt, was pure crossover
ironic, not in the least cute, pure art. I have no greatest hits of
course, no golds, no platinums, none of the fabulous and rare ores,
elements, and alchemicals of the Las Vegans; in me metallurgy
reduced to mere spin-off, simple dross. Anticipating, I even tried
 PIECES OF SOAP • 3

to make the case with my publisher that we should use the other
crossover phrase as well and display prominently on the jacket the
fact that the book was “Not Available in Stores.” An in-joke for
an outsider. For me, I mean.
To this point, at least, I’ve been talking only along the fringes
of art and fiction, my notion of crossover simplistic—allusions,
slogans, and puns, statutory miles from my argument. But even
allusions, slogans, and puns with their pentimento, almost geo-
logical, layers and palimpsest arrangements, do in primary colors
what good fiction with its infinite palette must always try to do.

·
Let me tell you about the flamenco dancer.
The flamenco dancer sits in the café against the whitewashed
walls, slouched in his wooden chair. While the women dance,
a guitar player, his feet oddly stolid and flatfoot on the small
platform, leans his ear against the back of his instrument as if he is
tuning it. Another gazes impassively across the fretted fingerboard
of his guitar as though he were blind. The family—it is impossible
to know relationships here, to distinguish husbands from brothers,
sisters from wives—a mysterious consanguinity undefined as
the complicated connections in circus; only the standing, hand-
clapping man in the suit, shouting encouragement like commands,
seems in authority here, or the woman, her broad, exposed back
and shoulders spilling her gown like the slipped, toneless flesh
of powerful card players. Even the slouching brother? husband?
nephew? son? is attentive but demure, the women’s hair pulled so
tightly into their comb tiaras you can see the deep, straight furrows
of their scalps. Their arrhythmic clapping is not so much on cue
as beside it, beneath it, random as traffic, signaled by some private,
 STANLEY ELKIN • 4

internal urging like spontaneous pronouncement at a prayer

meeting. Yes. Like testimony, like witness. Except for this—the
finger snapping, the hand claps never synchronous as applause,
the occasional gutturals of the men and the abrupt chatter of
the women like a musical gossip—they do not seem absorbed,
or even very interested, their attention deflected, thrown as the
voice of a ventriloquist, loss of affect like a dominant mood. Inside
the passionate music and performance they are rigid, distracted
as jugglers. The men and women, patient in their half circle of
chairs as timid Johns, polite whores in a brothel, seem even less
aware of each other than they are of the performers, kinship and
relationship in abeyance, whatever of love that connects them
dissolved, intimacy stoicized, the curious family in the cavelike
room suddenly widowed, suddenly widowered, orphaned, returned
to some griefless condition of independence.
And now the bailora completes her turn. Like some human
beast, she seems to rise from the broad, tiered flounces of her cos-
tume as from a package of waves at a shoreline, the great, fabric
petals of her long train swirled, heaped as seawater at her feet,
her immaculate ass, hips, thighs, and tits a lesson in the meaty
rounds of some mythic geometry, her upper arms spreading from
her shoulders like wings, angled to her forearms, her forearms
angled to her wrists, her wrists and hands and fingers and long
Latin nails a squared circle of odd, successive dependencies, the
stiff, queer displacement of the askew fingers like some hoodoo
signal to charm the bright arrogance of the dance.
The man in the suit—when did the cigarette, burned out now,
only a dead ash longer than the intact paper that supports it, go
into his lips?—beats an asyndeton, paratactic, ungrammatical ap-
plause. It is that same deliberate offbeat accompaniment that ear-
lier had almost but not quite violated the heel clicks and toe taps
 PIECES OF SOAP • 5

of the bailora. No matter how studiously the audience in the café

tries to keep up with it, they cannot fall in with this artful dodger.
Now the flamenco dancer rises from his chair. Slim and grave as a
bullfighter he moves in his gypsy silks and gabardines, his trapezist’s
pasodoble entrances and heroics. Alone, it is as if he marches in
a procession, deadpan as a saint, solemn as Jesus. He looks like
a condemned man leading an invisible party of executioners and
priests to his gallows, the host at his own murder feast. There is
nothing epicene or hermaphroditic in his bearing, yet he could
almost be the embodiment of some third sex, or no, some sexual
specialist, a fucker of virgins, say, of nymphets and schoolgirls and
all the newly menstrual. In his tight, strange clothing, the trousers
that rise above the waist and close about his spine, the small of his
back, the narrow jacket and vest that just meet them, leaving off
exactly where the trousers begin, not a fraction of an inch of excess
material, sausaged into his clothes as the girls’ hair had been into
their comb tiaras, the bulge of his genitals customized, everything,
all, all bespoke, fitting his form, seamless as apple peel, the crack in
his ass, the scar on his hip, he seems dressed, buttocks to shoulders,
in a sort of tights, some magic show-biz gypsy latex.
And now he is in position on the platform, conducted there
by the asyncopatic hand claps of the man in the suit.

At first he appears the perfect flamenco analogue of a bullfighter.

If the women, with their elaborate hand and arm movements,
had seemed to flourish banderillas and brandish lances, the fla-
menco dancer with his minimal upper-body gestures and pile-
driver footwork, seems to wield capes, do long, stationary passes,
slow-motion veronicas, outrageous down-on-one-knee rodillas.
Indeed, with his furious heel-toe, heel-toe momentum, he seems
at times to be the actual bull itself, pawing the ring of platform
 STANLEY ELKIN • 6

in flamenco rage. Bullfighter and bull, as the dancing woman had

seemed an extension of the actual sea.
This is what the flamenco dancer looks like.
He has the face of a cruel, handsome Indian and looks inso-
lent as a man in a tango. There are layers of indifference on his
face like skin, like feature itself, some fierce inappetency and a
listlessness so profound that that itself might almost be his ruling
passion, some smoky nonchalance of the out-of-love. Not cold,
not even cool, for these words at least suggest an idea of tempera-
ture, and the flamenco dancer seems to have been born adiabatic,
aseptic. What, on someone else’s face, might look like sneer, snarl,
contempt, may, on his, signify no more than the neutral scorn and
toughness on the face of a bulldog.
Now the flamenco dancer is possessed by his duende, his mu-
sical dybbuk. His is jondo, profound—death, anguish, tragedy.
The larger issues. (Music is hard. In prose, music is very hard
to do, unconvincing as lyrics, a cappella on a page. Avoid trying
to render music. Avoid the sensations of orgasm. Steer clear of
madmen as protagonists, and likewise eschew a writer as a hero
of the fiction. And it’s swimming at your own risk in the stream of
consciousness. “Knowing believes before believing remembers,”
says Faulkner in a Joe Christmas section in Light in August. What
the hell does that mean?) And the guitarist is singing his serious
soleares, calling his cante like a ragman, whining his tune like a
cantor. Davvening despair.

I am no longer what I was [he sings,

calls, whines, davvens]
now will I be aga-ain
I am a tree of sadness
in the shadow of a waa-aall . . .
 PIECES OF SOAP • 7

A woman was the cause

of my first downfall;
there is no perdition in the world
that is not caused by women . . .

In the neighborhood of Triana

there is neither pen nor ink
with which to write my mother,
whom I haven’t seen for . . . ye-ars.

“¡Ole! ”s pour in from the satellite performers half an orbit

behind the flamenco dancer. “¡Ole! ”s like an agreement, a deal, an
oral handshake, a struck bargain. The done/done arrangements of
serious negotiation.
And now it happens. Just now. The flamenco dancer is doing
a particularly difficult riff. This murderous tango of a man whose
body is one taut line of mood, who, touched at one end of that body
should, by the laws of physics if not the conventions of his trade, like
the strings on the musician’s guitar, vibrate at the other, but whose
art it is to defy physics, to drive his feet like pistons without ruffling
a ruffle of his shirt, who does that, whose ruling second skin of cos-
tume, revealing still that inch and a half of scar, the material caught
in it, in the scar, the magic show-biz gypsy latex, stuck there like
the long, dark vertical of a behind snagged in the pants of a fat man
rising from a chair on a hot day, does not, does not, display a single
qualm of muscle, not one quiver, tremor, shiver, flutter, not one
shake, not even his trousers which, snug as they are from mid-thigh
to the small of the back, are cut like normal men’s beneath that and
actually hang like a gaucho’s in a sort of a flare below the knee, not
even his damn trousers jump! It is as if he is the ventriloquist (you
must come back; you must return and use everything; you must use
 STANLEY ELKIN • 8

up your material; you must move the furniture around); it is as if

he is the ventriloquist, only what he throws is not his voice but his
feet, his shoe leather; it is as if he is the ventriloquist, has exactly
on the physical plane the ventriloquist’s schizophrenic detachment,
straight man and comic all together all at once, only it ain’t only his
lips that don’t move, it’s everything! His hands are stilled, his calves
are quiet, his knees, the ruffles on his shirt, all his torso, and it’s as
if he really is detached, actually separated from the interests of his
body, only his feet going on about their business like steps drawn
on a dance chart.
Except, as I say, now it happens. The dark fandango of a fel-
low is grinning. He is grinning; not smiling, grinning; not pleased
as punch; probably not even happy; but grinning, grinning. And
not just grinning, not simple human cheer or the Cheshire risibles
of pleased teeth, but the original, paradigmatic, caught-out, pants
down, caught-in-the-act, shit-eating smirk of grin itself!

Because that is how the flamenco dancer must be rendered, I

think. A man who never grins, whose profession it is to keep a
straight face, who earns his bread by artful scorn, whose squared
back, poseur, gypsy bearing is by ordinary the stately four-four
time of toreros and graduating seniors, must be shown with his
face naked, his bared teeth and grinning lips like private parts.
There must be crossover, what joke writers call the “switch.”
There must, that is, be a grafting of one condition upon another,
the episodic or eventful equivalencies of pun and slogan, the
schizophrenic tensions and torsions—though unless he’s a minor
character the flamenco dancer may not be mad, recall—of all
discrepant allegiance.
It’s like this. A flamenco dancer, a tinker, a tailor, a candlestick
maker, any human being, cannot be shown in fiction without
 PIECES OF SOAP • 9

quirk, wrinkle, slippage—the fall, I mean, from the photographic,

all, I mean, the strictly realistic and correct dictionary parameters
and ideals of grace. Which explains whiskey priests, golden-heart
whores, hung-over surgeons, cowardly soldiers, misers who tithe,
mercenaries who develop some long-haul loyalty they cannot un-
derstand or even very definitively or coherently explain. “A man,”
Hemingway’s dying Harry Morgan says in To Have and Have
Not, “one man alone ain’t got. No man alone now. No matter how
a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” Which explains,
that is, all driven stereotype and fictional cliché. But the instincts
of the cliché are correct; only the judgment of the writer is flawed,
his critical lapse of recognition, maybe his reading habits. He is
like the writer of mystery stories pursuing the idiosyncratic as
relentlessly as ever his amateur detective pursued any murderer.
But I’m not talking about the idiosyncratic so much as I am
about the strange—the flat-out, let-stand, mysterious. If there
can be no flamenco dancer without the shit-eating grin, neither
ought there to be any of the tight hospital corners of explanation.
In James Agee’s A Death in the Family there occurs perhaps one
of the strangest ghost stories I’ve ever read. Jay, the father, has just
been buried. The family returns to the house after the funeral. Here
Agee discharges point of view into the disparate consciousnesses of
a handful of characters. Upstairs the mother senses a presence in
the room—that of her dead husband. Simultaneously, in another
part of the house, their little boy feels that his father’s spirit has
suddenly returned. Still another relative hears an odd noise from
the dead to comfort his mourners. Each character is certain that Jay
has come back, is with them again, but, not wanting to upset the
others who might not understand, decides to say nothing about the
visitation. Agee never explains the startling conviction of reunion
each has experienced. Indeed, he never even alludes to it.
 STANLEY ELKIN • 10

Or Anthony Powell. In his novel From a View to a Death,

Powell draws a tight and quite conventional picture of the middle
professional class. Mrs. is sixtyish, a bit dowdy, a touch past it but
still civilized. Mr. is a professional soldier, a major, retired. They
live an uncomplicated home life in a genteel but ordinary house
a few miles from town. They drink sherry, they take the Times.
And one morning his wife goes into town to do some shopping. I
don’t have the book in front of me, but this, at least approximately,
is what happens. “You’ll be all right, dear?” “Oh, yes, I’ll read I
should think.” “Is there anything you need?” “Cigarettes. I require
cigarettes.” “What, don’t you have cigarettes?” “Well I thought I
did, but it appears I’ve run out.” “I’ll bring some from Scrapple.”
“Most kind. Most decent.” “It’s on my way. It isn’t as if it wasn’t
on my way.” “Most considerate.” “And I did wish to see Scrap-
ple. Ask after his wife.” “Mnn.” “What’s that, dear?” “My book. I
can’t seem to find that book I was reading.” “What, the one about
the campaigns?” “Yes, the campaign one, that’s it.” She sees the
book and brings it to him. “Oh,” she says, “that sunlight! Much
too bright on the page.” “Yes. It is rather. Yes.” “Shall I draw the
drapes then? You could switch on the lamp.” “Most thoughtful.
Yes.” And she draws the drapes and the major thanks her, and
they kiss good-bye, and she goes out to start the car. He hears it
start up and listens to her drive off and rises from the chair beside
which the lamp is now burning. He puts the book about the cam-
paigns on the seat of the wing chair so that he won’t misplace it
again and walks into another room. When he returns he is dressed
in his wife’s clothes, even her makeup, even her hat. He sits back
down in the chair and reads the book about the campaigns by
the light of the lamp in the drape-drawn room. That is the end
of the chapter. Powell never mentions the major’s transvestism
again. Though we see him again. And each time we do, each time,
 PIECES OF SOAP • 11

observing him closely now, astonished by him, gradually taken

with an apparently decent man, we think: This fellow dresses up
in women’s clothes; he likes to put on a girdle; he enjoys the brace
of a brassiere, the squeeze of a pump. There is that faintly geolog-
ical feel of crossover, character layered as a cake.
Not the idiosyncratic, not the strange, maybe not even the
mysterious, finally, so much as the queer, protuberant salience
of the obliquely sighted. What the periscope saw, what goes on
in the corner of the eye, talking pictures in the kaleidoscope, an
eye staring back at you, weeping, through the keyhole, the appli-
cation of a close but possibly afflicted vision, as if writers were
color-blind, say, or mental. Because the flamenco dancers and the
ghosts and the British majors (ret.) are all used up. We endanger a
species simply by mentioning it. So not the idiosyncratic, strange,
or mysterious, or even that queer protuberant salience of the
obliquely sighted; maybe only surprise. Which I take to be some
flipped-coin mix—flipped-coin because it can go either way—of
the ordinary in league with the exotic, the strange displacements
of the ordinary. The flamenco dancers and ghosts and majors re-
tired are all used up, but we can never be quit of them, or they of
us. We must wring them dry as a sheet, put usurer’s pressures on
them, dun them with obligation, hit them when they’re down.
And, using surprise, surprise always in some un-Hitchcockian
way so that surprise is not ever expected, not ever the form itself
that is, not ever looked for, some logical, non-Jawsian sense of
the thing. Not Boo! from a closet or Happy Birthday! from pals.
Surprise inevitable as verdict, ordered as law.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was one of those

fine, rare spring days in New York when optimism flows like
an energy, when, mysteriously, there is a kind of astonishing
 STANLEY ELKIN • 12

democracy in the air, the pollen count zero and the ego and envy
in abeyance, not even coveting my neighbor’s wife, not coveting at
all, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, this old Scrooge, bet-
ter than Christmas; not “You, boy! You know the poulterer on the
High Street? Fetch a goose, I’ll write you into the will!” Because
you figure he doesn’t need it, convinced everyone is a personage
anyway, the pimply fellow in dirty jeans, the bag lady, the Howard
Hughes type fishing coins from the gutter—all, all personages,
all upperly mobile and down from the three-million-buck co-ops
across Fifth Avenue, out for a breath of air, a touch of art. Your
eye out for Kissinger, your eye out for Jackie.
On Eighty-first Street, personages were sprawled on the mu-
seum steps eating hot dogs, knotted saltbread, sipping soda. Two
vendors, their marvelous wagons with their clever compartments
like trick drawers in a desk, about twelve feet apart, cry “Hot
dogs, hot dogs here,” more to each other than to their customers.
They do a brisk business and seem terribly amused, as if all that’s
at stake is the side bet they have down on who will turn over the
most saltbread today.
I schlepp up the steps, pulling myself along by the railing, this
privileged Porgy for whom even the bag ladies get out of the way.
I climb half a mile of stairs. (I love art!)
Schoolkids, cross-legged on the floor, civil and serious, snug
and curiously private in this public place, copy masterpieces into
their sketchbooks. Joan has organized a wheelchair. I wave to the
toddlers in strollers. “Hi kids,” I say, amusing myself that I know
what each is thinking, struggling to say. Not “Hey look at the
cripple,” but “Mommy, Mommy, there goes the biggest toddler
in the goddamn world!” I’m having a marvelous time, my heart in
high for once. Everywhere people back from the gift shop carry
Metropolitan Museum shopping bags like so much artistic grocery,
 PIECES OF SOAP • 13

and I have, in this perfect temperate zone with its ideal temperature
and humidity designed for canvas and pigment, a sense of some
best-foot-forward, good-willed world, as if Philanthropy were
an actual order of actual politics, as much a rule of reign as the
dynasties and kingdoms and tribes whose artifacts and paintings
and sculptures seem somehow the place’s generative treasury, not
a repository of art at all but native wealth, natural resource, like
Saudi oil, Zimbabwe chrome, Argentine beef. So close to the
source of things, I am close to tears. It could be the giant toddler
is simply overtired, on the edge of crankiness, tantrum. But nah,
nah, his heart’s in high, overwhelmed by the good order and best
behavior of the citizens of this good country, the schoolgirls seated
cross-legged on the floor, concentrating, intense, their lower lips
in their teeth to get a line just right, to catch it on the tip of their
drawing pens and hold it there, balancing, balancing, careful,
gentle as people in bomb squads, till they can thrust it safely onto
the drawing pad and be rid of it. (I will tell you something secret
about myself. It’s none of your business, but I don’t much care for
music, the classics I mean, the high symphonies and opera styles,
yet whenever I go to a concert I weep. It’s the cooperation that gets
me every time, that dedicated sense of the civil—not the music but
the musicians, the useless fiction of harmony they perpetuate. It is
this that gets me now.)
Did I tell you that it is Saturday? It is Saturday, and scattered
among the lovers and schoolkids, the Fifth Avenue co-op owners,
the freelance tour guides and museum guards and gift-shop mar-
keters and toddlers—use it; use it up—the retired majors and fla-
menco dancers—are fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. The
children—use it; use it up—have lunched on vendor hot dogs
and have mustard on their chins, the corners of their lips, bits of
saltbread like a light seasoning in the wrinkles of their clothes.
 STANLEY ELKIN • 14

The kids are oddly solicitous and gaze where their dads direct
their attentions with a courteous, leashed patience, not bored but
the opposite, concentrating—use it; use it up—working hard as
those schoolgirls cross-legged on the floor, intense themselves, as
nervous about line, but it’s their own expressions they’re perfect-
ing, that they must balance even longer than that memory on the
tip of that drawing pen, hold and hold like a smile for an old-time
photograph, breathing of course, even talking, giving and tak-
ing, exchanging ideas, opinion, but everything controlled as the
climate in this place, and suddenly I recognize these kids. They
are Saturday’s children, and they are here by court order, by offi-
cial decree, sentenced by a judge and their own mixed loyalties,
serving their time like good cons, and the fathers, too, sneaking a
glance at their watches, wondering if it’s time yet to go to the mu-
seum restaurant, time to get out altogether, figuring how much
time it will take up to get a cab to the Russian Tea Room, how
long the wait will be, how fast the service, which movie to take
the kid to, when it gets out, timing what’s left of the morning,
the long afternoon, doing in their heads all the sums of visitation,
rehearsing the customs of custody.
And I get an idea for a story. Perhaps it was my private joke
in the wheelchair that set it off, my vision of myself as a giant
toddler; perhaps it was all this, well, behaving, this sedate and
serious steady-state attention I feel all about me, the suspicion,
grown now to conviction, that no one is having a very good time;
certainly my sudden awareness of the divorced fathers and their
children, doing God knows what sums of custody in their heads,
had the most to do with it, but I have an idea for a story.
It’s this.
Julian’s—I even have the name—parents are divorced when
Julian is eleven years old, and Julian’s mother gets custody.
 PIECES OF SOAP • 15

The court grants Julian’s father liberal visitation privileges—

weekends, of course, certain specified holidays, Julian’s birthday in
even-numbered years. And Julian will spend at least one month
of his summer vacation with his dad.
Only when the story opens Julian is thirty-two years old, his
mother and father in their early fifties, and Julian is dutifully
waiting for his father’s Saturday visit. Nothing, absolutely nothing,
is wrong with Julian. Though he still lives at home, he has grown
up to be an intelligent, healthy young man, decently employed,
still single but ordinarily sexed, not particularly fixated on either
his mother or his dad. The story will concern itself with their
afternoon, Julian’s and his father’s, with the mutual anxieties both
have about these visits, anxieties not all that different from the
anxieties of the parents and children doing those secret sums of
custody in their heads. Perhaps they will visit the Metropolitan,
certainly they will go to the Russian Tea Room, where their order
will be taken by the man in the suit. I expect they will have the
conversation fathers and sons usually have on such occasions, the
father discreetly pressing Julian for information about his mother,
and Julian politely resisting, reluctant to be either go-between
or honest broker, and both, from time to time, glancing at their
watches.
The story is not yet written, or even begun, but I am satis-
fied that it satisfies my criteria, that it has all the elements—the
shit-eating grin on the flamenco dancer’s face, the idiosyncratic,
the strange, the mysterious, the queer protuberant salience of the
obliquely sighted, crossover, and what the periscope saw, surprise,
and all the rest of these strange displacements of the ordinary.