Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) Read online

  The genius carries his most important papers about with him in a green Sears toolbox.

  He did not win the Nobel Prize again this year.

  It was neither the year of his country nor the year of his discipline. To console him, the National Foundation gives him a new house.

  The genius meets with a group of students. The students tell the genius that the concept “genius” is not, currently, a popular one. Group effort, they say, is more socially productive than the isolated efforts of any one man, however gifted. Genius by its very nature sets itself over against the needs of the many. In answering its own imperatives, genius tends toward, even embraces, totalitarian forms of social organization. Tyranny of the gifted over the group, while bringing some advances in the short run, inevitably produces a set of conditions which—

  The genius smokes thoughtfully.

  A giant brown pantechnicon disgorges the complete works of the Venerable Bede, in all translations, upon the genius’s lawn—a gift from the people of Cincinnati!

  Q: Is America a good place for genius?

  A: I have found America most hospitable to genius.

  “I always say to myself, ‘What is the most important thing I can be thinking about at this minute?’ But then I don’t think about it.”

  His driver’s license expires. But he does nothing about renewing it. He is vaguely troubled by the thought of the expired license (although he does not stop driving). But he loathes the idea of taking the examination again, of going physically to the examining station, of waiting in line for an examiner. He decides that if he writes a letter to the License Bureau requesting a new license, the bureau will grant him one without an examination, because he is a genius. He is right. He writes the letter and the License Bureau sends him a new license, by messenger.

  In the serenity of his genius, the genius reaches out to right wrongs—the sewer systems of cities, for example.

  The genius is reading The Genius, a 736-page novel by Theodore Dreiser. He arrives at the last page:

  “… What a sweet welter life is—how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a colorful symphony.”

  Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space….

  The genius gets up and looks at himself in a mirror.

  An organization has been formed to appreciate his thought: the Blaufox Gesellschaft. Meetings are held once a month, in a room over a cafeteria in Buffalo, New York. He has always refused to have anything to do with die Gesellschaft, which reminds him uncomfortably of the Browning Society. However, he cannot prevent himself from glancing at the group’s twice-yearly Proceedings, which contains such sentences as “The imbuement of all reaches of the scholarly community with Blaufox’s views must, ab ovo, be our …”

  He falls into hysteria.

  Moments of self-doubt …

  “Am I really a—”

  “What does it mean to be a—”

  “Can one refuse to be a—”

  His worst moment: He is in a church, kneeling in a pew near the back. He is gradually made aware of a row of nuns, a half-dozen, kneeling twenty feet ahead of him, their heads bent over their beads. One of the nuns however has turned her head almost completely around, and seems to be staring at him. The genius glances at her, glances away, then looks again: she is still staring at him. The genius is only visiting the church in the first place because the nave is said to be a particularly fine example of Burgundian Gothic. He places his eyes here, there, on the altar, on the stained glass, but each time they return to the nuns, his nun is still staring. The genius says to himself, This is my worst moment.

  He is a drunk.

  “A truly potent abstract concept avoids, resists closure. The ragged, blurred outlines of such a concept, like a net in which the fish have eaten large, gaping holes, permit entry and escape equally. What does one catch in such a net? The sea horse .with a Monet in his mouth. How did the Monet get there? Is the value of the Monet less because it has gotten wet? Are there tooth marks in the Monet? Do sea horses have teeth? How large is the Monet? From which period? Is it a water lily or group of water lilies? Do sea horses eat water lilies? Does Parke-Bernet know? Do oil and water mix? Is a mixture of oil and water bad for the digestion of the sea horse? Should art be expensive? Should artists wear beards? Ought beards to be forbidden by law? Is underwater art better than overwater art? What does the expression ‘glad rags’ mean? Does it refer to Monet’s paint rags? In the Paris of 1878, what was the average monthly rent for a north-lit, spacious studio in an unfashionable district? If sea horses eat water lilies, what percent of their daily work energy, expressed in ergs, is generated thereby? Should the holes in the net be mended? In a fight between a sea horse and a flittermouse, which would you bet on? If I mend the net, will you forgive me? Do water rats chew upon the water lilies? Is there a water buffalo in the water cooler? If I fill my water gun to the waterline, can I then visit the watering place? Is fantasy an adequate substitute for correct behavior?”

  The genius proposes a world inventory of genius, in order to harness and coordinate the efforts of genius everywhere to create a better life for all men.

  Letters are sent out …

  The response is staggering!

  Telegrams pour in …

  Geniuses of every stripe offer their cooperation.

  The Times prints an editorial praising the idea …

  Three thousand geniuses in one hall!

  The genius falls into an ill humor. He refuses to speak to anyone for eight days.

  But now a brown UPS truck arrives at his door. It contains a ceremonial sword (with inscription) forged in Toledo, courtesy of the Mayor and City Council of Toledo, Spain. The genius whips the blade about in the midmorning air, signing the receipt with his other hand….

  Opening

  THE actors feel that the music played before the curtain rises will put the audience in the wrong mood. The playwright suggests that the (purposefully lugubrious) music be played at twice-speed. This peps it up somewhat while retaining its essentially dark and gloomy character. The actors listen carefully, and are pleased.

  The director, in white overalls and a blue work shirt, whispers to the actors. The director is tender with the actors, like a good father, calms them, solicits their opinions, gives them aspirin. The playwright regards the actors with die greatest respect. How sweetly they speak! They have discovered meanings in his lines far beyond anything he had imagined possible.

  ARDIS: But it’s always that way, always.

  PAUL: Not necessarily, dear friend. Not necessarily.

  The rug on the set was done by a famous weaver, indeed is a modem classic, and costs four thousand dollars. It has been lent to the production (for program credit) as has the chrome-and-leather sofa. No one steps on the rug (or sits on the sofa) oftener than necessary.

  The playwright studies the empty set for many hours. Should the (huge, magnificent) plant be moved a few inches to the left? The actors are already joking about being upstaged by the plant. The actors are gentle, amusing people, but also very tough, and physically strong. Many of their jokes involve scraps of dialogue from the script, which become catchphrases of general utility: “Not necessarily, dear friend. Not necessarily.”

  In the rehearsal room the costume designer spreads out his sketches over a long table. The actors crowd around to see how they will look in the first act, in the second act. The designs sparkle, there is no other word for it. Also, the costume designer is within the budget, whereas the set designer was eighteen thousand over and the set had to be redesigned, painfully.

  An actor whispers to the playwright. “A playwright,” he says, “is a man who has decided that the purpose of human life is to describe human life. Don’t you find that odd?” The playwright, who has never thought about his vocation in quite this way, does find it odd. He worries about it all day.

  The playwright loves the theatre when it is empty. When it has people in it he does not love it
so much; the audience is a danger to his play (although it’s only sometimes he feels this). In the empty theatre, as in a greenhouse, his play grows, thrives. Rehearsals, although tedious in the extreme and often disheartening—an actor can lose today something he had yesterday—are an intelligent process charged with hope.

  The actors tell stories about other shows they’ve been in, mostly concerning moments of disaster onstage. “When I did Charity in London—” In the men’s dressing room, one of the actors tells a long story about a female colleague whose hair caught fire during a production of Saint Joan. “I poured Tab on it,” he says. Photographs are taken for the newspapers. The playwright goes alone for lunch to a Chinese restaurant which has a bar. He is the only one in the group who drinks at lunchtime. The temperate, good-natured actors vote in all elections and vehemently support a nuclear freeze.

  PAUL: You’ve got to … transcend … the circumstances. Know what I mean?

  REGINA: Easier said than done, boyo.

  The playwright makes a shocking discovery. One of his best exchanges—

  ARDIS: The moon is beautiful now.

  PAUL: You should have seen it before the war.

  —freighted with the sadness of unrecapturable time, is also to be found, almost word for word, in Oscar Wilde’s Impressions of America. How did this happen? Has he written these lines, or has he remembered them? He honestly cannot say. In a fit of rectitude, he cuts the lines.

  The producer slips into a seat in the back of the house and watches a scene. Then he says, “I love this material. I love it.” The playwright asks that the costume worn by one of the actresses in the second act be changed. It makes her look too little-girlish, he feels. The costume designer disagrees but does not press the point. Now my actress looks more beautiful, the playwright thinks.

  The opening is at hand. The actors bring the playwright small, thoughtful gifts: a crock of imported mustard, a finely printed edition of Ovid’s Art of Love. The playwright gives the actors, men and women, little cloth sacks containing gold-wrapped chocolates.

  The notices are good, very good.

  LIGHTS UP THE SKY OVER

  OFF-BROADWAY AND STIMULATES

  MEN’S MINDS

  —Cue

  The actors are praised, warmly and with discrimination. People attend the play in encouraging numbers. At intermission the lobby is filled with well-dressed, enthusiastic people, discussing the play. The producer, that large, anxious man, steams with enthusiasm. The critics, he tells the playwright, are unreliable. But sometimes one has good fortune. The play, he tells the playwright, will remain forever in the history of the theatre.

  After the show closes, the director purchases the big, spiky plant that appeared, burning with presence, throughout the second act. The actors, picking up their gear, pause to watch the plant being loaded onto a truck. “Think he can teach it to go to the corner for coffee and a Danish?” “Easier said than done, boyo.”

  In his study, the playwright begins his next play, which will explore the relationship between St. Augustine and a Carthaginian girl named Luna and die broken bones of the heart.

  Sindbad

  THE BEACH: Sindbad, drowned animal, clutches at the sand of still another island shore.

  His right hand, marvelous upon the pianoforte, opens and closes. His hide is roasted red, his beard white with crusted salt. The broken beam to which he clung to escape his shattered vessel lies nearby.

  He hears waltzes from the trees.

  He should, of course, rouse himself, get to his feet, gather tree fruits, locate a spring, build a signal fire, or find a stream that will carry him toward the interior of this strange new place, where he will encounter a terrifying ogre of some sort, outwit him, and then take possession of the rubies and diamonds, big as baseballs, which litter the ogre’s domains, wonderfully.

  Stir your stumps, sir.

  Classroom: It’s true that the students asked me to leave. I had never taught in the daytime before, how was I to know how things were done in the daytime?

  I guess they didn’t like my looks. I was wearing shades (my eyes unused to so much light) and a jacket that was, admittedly, too big for me. I was rather prominently placed toward the front of the room, in the front of the room to be precise, sitting on the desk that faced their desks, fidgeting.

  “Would you just, please, leave?” the students said.

  The chair had asked me, “How’d you like to teach in the daytime? Just this once?” I said that I could not imagine such a thing but that I would do my very best. “Don’t get carried away, Robert,” she said, “it’s only one course, we’ve got too many people on leave and now this damnable flu…” I said I would prepare myself carefully and buy a new shirt. “That’s a good idea,” she said, looking closely at my shirt, which had been given to me by my younger brother, the lawyer. He was throwing out shirts.

  Sindbad’s wives look back: “I knew him, didn’t you know that I knew him?”

  “I didn’t think that a person such as you could have known him.”

  “Intimately. That’s how well I knew him. I was his ninth wife.”

  “Well of course you were more in the prime of life then. It was more reasonable to expect something.”

  “He treated me well, on the whole. In the years of our intimacy. Many gowns of great costliness.”

  “You’d never know it to look at you. I mean now.”

  “Well I have other things besides these things. I don’t wear my better things all the time. Besides gowns, he gave me frocks. Shoes of beaten lizard.”

  “Maybe jewels?”

  “Rubies and diamonds big as baseballs. I seem to remember a jeweled horsewhip. To whip my horses with. I rode, in the early mornings, on the cliffs, the cliffs overlooking the sea.”

  “You had a sea.”

  “Yes, there was a sea, adjacent to the property. He was fond of the sea.”

  “He must have been very well-off then. When I knew him he was just a merchant. A small merchant.”

  “Yes, he’d begun as a poor person, tried that for a while, didn’t like it, and then ventured forth. Upon the sea.”

  The Beaux-Arts Bull: At the Beaux-Arts Ball given by the Art and Architecture Departments I saw a young woman wearing what appeared to be men’s cotton underwear. The undershirt was sleeveless and the briefs, cut very high on the sides, had the designer’s name (“EGIZIO”) in half-inch red letters stitched around the waistband.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She raised her hands, which were encased in red rubber gloves. “Lady Macbeth,” she said. Then she asked me to leave.

  So I went out into the parking lot carrying my costume, a brightly polished English horn. If anyone had asked me who I was I had intended saying I was one of Robin Hood’s merry men. One of the students followed me, wanted to know if I had a wife. I answered honestly that I did not, and told her that if you taught at night you weren’t allowed to have a wife. It was a sort of unwritten law, understood by all. “You’re not allowed to have a wife and you’re not allowed to have a car,” I told her honestly.

  “Then what are you doing in this parking lot?” she asked. I showed her my old blue bicycle, parked between a Camaro and a Trans Am. “Do you have a house?” she asked, and I said that I had a room somewhere, with a radio in it and one of those little refrigerators that sit upon a table.

  Sindbad’s first emporium in Baghdad: When we opened Sindbad’s we did not anticipate the good results we obtained almost immediately.

  The people leaped over the counters and wrested the goods from our hands and from the shelves behind the counters.

  Stock boys ran back and forth between the stockrooms and the counters. We had developed patterns of running back and forth so that Stock Boy A did not collide with Stock Boy B. Some warped, some woofed.

  We had always wanted a store and had as children played “store” with tiny cedar boxes replicating real goods. Now we had an actual store, pearl-colored with accents o
f saturated jade.

  Every day, people leaped over the counters and wrested goods from the hands of our brave, durable clerks. Our store was glorious, glorious. The simple finest of everything, that was what we purveyed. Often people had been wandering around for years trying to find the finest, lost, uncertain. Then they walked through our great bronze doors resonant with humming filigree. There it was, the finest.

  Even humble items were the finest of their kind. Our straight pin was straighter than any other straight pin ever offered, and pinned better, too.

  Once, a little girl came into the store, alone. She had only a few gold coins, and we took them from her, and made her happy. We had never, in our entire careers as merchants, seen a happier little girl as she left the store, carrying in her arms the particular goods she had purchased with her few, but real, gold coins.

  Once, a tall man came into the store, tall but bent, arthritis, he was bent half-double, but you could tell that he was tall, or had been tall before he became bent, three or four lines of physical suffering on his forehead. He asked for food. We furnished him with foodstuffs from Taillevent in Paris, the finest, and not a centime did we charge him. Because he was bent.

  In our pearl-colored store we had a pearl beyond price, a tulip bulb beyond price, and a beautiful slave girl beyond price. These were displayed behind heavy glass set in the walls. No offer for these items was ever accepted. They were beyond price. Idealism ruled us in these matters.

  The students: “Would you please leave now?” they asked. “Would you please just leave?”

  Then they all started talking to each other, they turned in their seats and began talking to each other, the air grew loud, it was rather like a cocktail party except that everybody was sitting down, the door opened and a waiter came in with drinks on a tray followed by another waiter with water chestnuts wrapped in bacon on a tray and another waiter with more drinks. It was exactly like a cocktail party except that everybody was sitting down. So I took a drink from a tray and joined one of the groups and tried to understand what they were saying.