“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.
Finally, during a pause, I gasped. He stopped talking at once, thinking it was the old business all over again. Out of a corner of a veiled eye I could see he was angry. I gasped a second time, but it was nothing like anything I had shown them before. There was terror in it, but the terror that exists before grandeur. The man could see he hadn’t caused it. He could see, as I meant him to see, that he was insignificant there. I pitched forward in my seat, the movement heavy, strained, as though I were being tugged by invisible hands. I trembled and there were tears in my eyes.