Boswell: A Modern Comedy by Stanley Elkin

Author:Stanley Elkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781453204108
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2010-10-26T10:00:00+00:00

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

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