An Open Letter to Laura Bush

Dear Mrs. Bush:

You are, by all accounts and the evidence of my own experience, a kind, thoughtful woman. Your husband, meanwhile, is on the verge of opening a third front in his so-called War on Terror. Almost everything he does these days (apart from the song-and-dance routines) signals that he is getting ready to attack Iran, though as you must realize, he hasn’t finished the job in Afghanistan or in Iraq.

It’s a distressing possibility, and most of us feel like helpless bystanders (because we are), while the President plows relentlessly into another open-ended military conflict. You’re in a different position, however. You can help, perhaps even stop him. The fate of the United States is within your grasp, if you’ll just do one thing.

Mrs. Bush, please stop making fun of your husband’s penis.

You are, as I say, a very nice lady. You probably don’t even realize what you’re doing. Maybe you’ve given your husband’s penis a pet name. To you, it’s cute. To him, it’s belittling. Therefore, he’s got to go out and prove his manhood, again and again and again.

There’s really no other plausible explanation for his behavior. According to psychologists, most little boys experience significant trauma when they see their fathers naked. “His is so much bigger — why is mine so little?” Although most men outgrow the trauma, and although by now your husband’s penis is probably as big as his father’s (ask Condi), perhaps even as big as his mother’s, it seems certain that your husband never got over the early-childhood shock. He continues to need significant reassurance in this regard. Reassurance that you can provide — and clearly don’t.

Please begin immediately to practice saying things like, “Oh, Daddy!” “It’s so big! I can’t take any more!” and “Are you sure you’re not Italian?” Try out these phrases when you’re alone with your husband — or better yet, try them out when you’re in public. Tell the world what a stud he is. He may blush and appear uncomfortable, but deep down, he’s loving every minute.

Angela Merkel shows you how it’s done.

I realize that you like to keep your private life private, that you’re polite, that you don’t like to lie. But there’s so much at stake here.

Because once you’ve reassured your husband that he’s man enough, you’ll be able to move on to the next phase: persuading him that, sometimes, it’s a good idea to pull out.

Thank you for your time.

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Flameout

Parisians rally in support of Tibet.

Sometimes you can learn a lot about a place just by its atmosphere. When I first visited Amsterdam, and saw the light at play with the water in the canals, I understood at once why the Dutch excelled at landscape painting. There’s something brilliant yet humid in the air, as if the whole town were a canvas still drying. In Israel, the light catches the dust in the air and turns everything to gold. No wonder the ancient Hebrews believed that God lived in the sky, yet was everywhere; no wonder they believed no other god could compete with him.

By contrast with those places, the air in Beijing taught me something about politics.

On my first trip to China, a whirlwind 20 hours in Shanghai in 1993, the government had already begun its campaign to host the Olympic Games. Everywhere one looked were posters and billboards with the official mascot, a creepily megacephalic, featherless, almost embryonic rooster, proclaiming, “Let us carry forward the glorious Olympic spirit!” Or something like that.

The bid failed. But the world had been served warning. China wanted to be taken seriously. And China wanted the Games. Not just anywhere — but in Beijing.

A few years later, in June 1997, I visited Beijing. And the very idea of pursuing any athletic activity in that atmosphere struck me as the height of folly. The city’s air would be polluted naturally by dust (rolling in from the Gobi Desert), even were there no automobiles, factory smokestacks, and outdoor barbecues. But there are — and they choke the air. It’s worse in hot weather. Which is, of course, the weather one expects for the Summer Games.

I’m not kidding about the barbecues, by the way. A short time after I left town, the government cracked down on folks who like to cook lamb — fatty, greasy, smoky lamb — in their yards. The result was a noticeable reduction in air pollution. Since fewer Beijingers bicycle nowadays, and more of them drive, the reduction made less difference than it might have.

Not to mention the coal that fuels so much of China’s industry. Western environmentalists already had begun to complain to the Chinese — whose response amounted to, “We have a right to make the same mistakes you did, when you industrialized, a century ago.”

The air is poisonous. But if anyone ever doubted that politics play a role in the decisions of the Olympic Committee, the choice of Beijing for the 2008 Summer Games should settle the matter for good. China, only lightly experimenting with capitalism in 1993, had become an economic powerhouse, the Clinton Administration’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the Communist government had taken root, and few if any nations wanted to piss off the Chinese. Even if it meant health risks to athletes. What’s a little asthma, when there’s so much money and prestige at stake?

The torch takes a ride through Paris.

Nobody should be surprised now that political protests have erupted in response to the passing of the Olympic torch through Western capitals. The 2008 Games were politicized to start with, and politicized they will remain. The Chinese government, not accustomed to spontaneous free expression, suspects the complicity of hostile foreign agencies — as if people would protest the oppression of Tibet only if they were paid to do so.

Paris offered the perfect rebuttal to such thinking. During the disastrous, aborted circuit of the torch through town, there were plenty of two-legged protesters, yes, who despite extraordinary security measures and the cynical use of a woman in a wheelchair to carry the torch past the nation’s principal television studios, pretty much obliged the torchbearers to remain inside a bus for most of the route. But there was another kind of protester.

The skies of Paris opened up, with rain, hail and unseasonable sleet and snow on Monday, making it impossible to keep the torch lit. For you see, our air can teach lessons, too — to those who are willing to learn.

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Dear Applicant

Each year at this time, it is the sad responsibility of the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions to crush the dreams of thousands of young people like yourself.

That’s right, Einstein, you didn’t get in.

In the unlikely event that you don’t kill yourself on the spot, you will doubtless look back on this as the worst day of your life. Yet it is only the first step in a long march toward desperation, the beginning of your ordeal. You are henceforward an outcast, a pariah. We would like to tell you that things will look up, eventually. But come on. Be realistic.

This is what truly qualified scholars look like. Notice that they have their backs to you.

And from now on, intelligent people like these will talk about you behind your back. In fact, that’s what they’re doing here. It’s a seminar on how stupid you are. We’re sorry to have to tell you this. Really.

Exacerbating* your misery is the realization that, even as you’re crying your eyes out, we’re all drinking champagne and celebrating the last time we’ll ever deal with you again. (*That’s an SAT word. Remember the SAT? That’s the test you needed to ace in order to attend the College. Too bad you were stoned that morning.)

It may be some comfort to you to consider that at least you’re only getting a form letter — cranked out by a database in order to ruin the greatest number of young people in the most efficient manner. “At least,” you will tell yourself, “the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions never writes personal letters.”

Ordinarily, you would be right. But in your case, we felt compelled to make an exception.

You see these doors? Majestic, aren’t they? They are closed to you.

Frankly, we found your application overwhelming. And not in a good way. We thought we’d never get to the end of it. Mainly because you kept sending us more shit. Bad enough that your transcripts and teacher recommendations revealed you as a grade-grubbing suck-up (though we were surprised the grades weren’t better, considering what a little toady you are). But then the updates started to flow in.

What made you think we would care whether you placed All-State in marching band? Marching band? You might as well letter in hacky-sack. We didn’t really want to know that you’d been named recording secretary (a post somewhat less distinguished than hall monitor) of the Young Future Indicted Businesspersons of Corporate America Association. Or voted Senior Most Likely to Injure Himself. Or elected President of “Str8 Talk, the speech club for students who aren’t gay, lesbian or transgendered.”

And we certainly didn’t want to see your prize-winning essay on Ethan Frome. Trust us, there is nothing we don’t already know about that book.

Your life will never look like this.

Our initial and lingering negative impressions were compounded when we finally met you. The sophomore who gave you your campus tour was embarrassed by your repeated inquiries, in lecture and dining halls, and in the library stacks, whether “people ever do it here,” and she was bored by your rambling explanation why you feel this University needs a Department of Madonna Studies.

When it came time for your one-on-one interview with Bob Mathers, Class of ’57 — let’s just say he was already recommending a rejection before you offered to sleep with him, in exchange for a good review.

We are trying to build a community of minds here, buster, and not simply taking your parents’ life savings in exchange for room and board and a piece of high-quality deckle-edged vellum (suitable for framing) at the end of four years. We really mean that.

Regardless of whether they are on Spring Break, have Gone Wild, or are blind drunk, women like these will be forever out of your league.

So how could we possibly permit you to return to the College? During your Prospective Student Stay-Over Weekend, you drove the whole dorm crazy by acting out Monty Python routines, refusing to let anyone else join in or even to say “Ni.” You interrupted an art-history lecture on Classical and Hellenistic Statuary by singing “Milkshake” and “Sexyback” at what we sincerely hope was the top of your lungs. You asked the Dean of Students to buy you a bottle of vodka, and you threatened him with an egg-beater if he didn’t comply. You set fire to the laundry room. You stole the iPod of one of your roommates, and as for the other one, we’ve been told that services will be held on Thursday.

We could go on, but we are tired of thinking of you. It is time to heave your application file into the recycling bin. So be off!

Sincerely,

The Committee on Undergraduate Admissions

P.S. April Fool! We were just jerking your chain a little. Eventually, you had to know that the pressure of sending out acceptance and rejection letters this time of year would get to us. But seriously, you’ve been admitted to the Class of 2012. We’re looking forward to seeing you in the fall. Send us a check.

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April (Snow) Showers

News flash: As I write, it is snowing in Paris. A lot.

Winters are typically mild here, at least since I’ve lived in France. We’ve had only the briefest dusting of snow all year — in fact, it may not have been snow at all, but just a guy with dandruff shaking his head somewhere above me. Suddenly, now, the neighborhood is draped in a thin blanket of white. If it sticks in daylight, I’ll post a picture.


Update: No such luck. You will have to settle for these pictures of Act III of La Bohème instead.

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What Foods These Morsels Be!

Jock Bock

I’m now bracing myself for my 25th college reunion, which I will attend next month. One hardly knows what to expect from Providence, a place I haven’t visited much since I graduated. Friends tell me that College Hill has changed radically, although when I spent an afternoon there last March, I found my old haunts around West Quad and the Pembroke campus still more or less recognizable: it was East Campus, especially, that had been transformed. And Thayer Street, the main drag, has been in constant flux since the dawn of time, as far as I can tell. Like most places in America (and, alas, even on the Champs-Elysées), there are fewer mom-n-pop shops and more chain stores than there were when I was a kid. Soon no place on earth will have any distinctive character anymore, and you can go to Paris or Providence or Mars, or just stay home, and it will make no difference to anybody.

Well, as Proust points out, you can’t go back to a place anyway — only to the name you gave to a place. What you’re trying to return to isn’t a place but a moment, and the moment is gone. All you can do is remember.

It does help to have sensory triggers, such as his famous teacake, and for me it’s a matter of supreme regret that a couple of such triggers are forever denied me — neither the place nor the food remains. Memories of one do lead to memories of another, however. Thoughts of Providence bring memories of the turkey and cheese on a roll that I used to buy at the University Deli on Thayer — and those memories are swiftly joined by the grilled cheese sandwiches I used to eat at the Excelsior Hotel Coffee Shop for all of my first years in New York.

The Excelsior still stands, on 81st Street and Columbus Avenue, but the coffee shop long ago fell victim to the building’s reincarnation as a luxury residence. A greasy spoon simply didn’t match the developers’ ambitions. Back in the day, the coffee shop, just to the left of the front door, and slightly below street level, was a sunny, smoky place, linoleum-tiled, with a long counter and little square tables that we’d push together to seat as many intrepid friends as we could round up. Since the Excelsior was near the home of Sally Boldt’s sister Linda, who provided us our bivouac for all our first forays in the city, I began to frequent the coffee shop even before I moved to New York. For a long time, until about 1988, it was true that I’d eaten more meals in the Excelsior than I had in my own apartment.

As the menu put it, “William Shakespeare meant to say, ‘What foods these morsels be!’ Had he written these words, he would have been describing the food at the EXCELSIOR HOTEL COFFEE SHOP.” How I envied Amanda Green, who grew up around the corner! When she was a little girl, she told me, she used to “go for treats,” which meant going to the Excelsior.

The grilled window at left looked into the coffee shop;
Sylvia’s cash register stood before it.

The place was presided over by Sylvia, the hostess and cashier, a fascinating creature who was, we were certain, a former Ziegfeld girl. Sometimes she sang behind her register. Her hair bright red, her figure lean, a cigarette never far from her long, graceful fingers, she dressed with dramatic flair. My favorite outfit was a sort of chocolate-colored medieval gown, which she topped off with a green rooster-feather boa. She addressed everyone as “my darling” and “my love,” and she was reputed to live in an apartment upstairs.

We yearned to hear her stories and to learn her secrets. But there wasn’t time. Sylvia’s days in the shop were numbered already, and more and more frequently, we would go to the Excelsior for breakfast or lunch, and Sylvia wouldn’t be there. Sally Boldt sent her flowers and a get-well note once. And then one inevitable day, a waiter took her aside and told her that Sylvia had died.

It’s a great sorrow to me that I have no pictures of that beautiful woman. The photographer Catherine Karnow joined me at the Excelsior more times than I can count, and such was her courage that she once ordered the borscht (and such her discrimination that she liked it, and ordered it again the next time). Nowadays, shooting pictures is for Cathy a mere extension of breathing or consciousness: you can’t quite be sure she’s present if she hasn’t got a camera in her hand. And nowadays, she’d have taken whole portfolios and albums of Sylvia, whom she loved as much as Sally and I did. But in our youth, Cathy’s photographic passions weren’t yet fully developed, as it were, and to my knowledge she never took Sylvia’s picture.

The wait staff was comprised of “Red Jacket Men,” according to the explanation on the menu, which further boasted that, "taken together, they represent 167 years of service." Or somesuch figure. Sometimes we tried to do the math, but since the staff kept changing, we were sure the tally must change, too, though the menu never did. The Red Jacket Men didn’t wear jackets, of any color. Most did wear vests, though, and all of them communicated with each other in a dialect we didn’t comprehend. You’d place your order, and they’d shout to the kitchen, not the stereotypical “Adam and Eve on a raft, wreck ’em,” but things like “Jock bock.”

It took the linguistic genius of Andy Weems to decipher that one. “Jock bock” meant “grilled cheese with bacon” — G.C. Bac. Perhaps because he was the first to understand the term, it became his favorite dish. He ordered it even when he wasn’t in a restaurant; he sang it out to the lonely night in the empty streets of Manhattan. It was his battle cry, his “Excelsior.”

As God must see it: Thayer Street, Providence

In my memory, Andy is linked forever to the Excelsior, just as another roommate, Steve Biel, is linked to the University Deli in Providence. Though I first visited the deli with Rob Goldberg, a resident advisor who lived on my freshman hall, it was Steve’s passion for the place that made me a regular the next year.

The shop wasn’t much bigger than a closet, and though three men might stand abreast there, a fourth would have to knock down a wall or two just to squeeze in edgewise. There were rows of shelves, filled with cans of chicken broth and other delicacies that no one ever touched, much less bought, and then, at the rear of the store, a deli counter. It took a while to see that, however, because most days you had to stand on line for a very long time (usually you planned on half an hour, even if there were only three people in front of you) before you ever got near the counter.

And you could be right at the counter before you caught a glimpse of Sam. Sam the Deli Man. A refugee from Hitler or Stalin or both, he’d come to Providence in the late 1930s and never left. Elmer Blistein, my Shakespeare professor, who was an undergrad studying in the John Hay Library when Pearl Harbor was attacked, used to get his sandwiches from Sam. So did another alumnus, my Greek professor, Bruce Donovan. And so did Steve Biel.

Sam was short, and time had made him shorter. His eyes barely peeped over the counter top. His shoulders stooped until his head seemed to grow directly out of his chest. He was gruff, he was stubborn, and he was glacially deliberate. His thick accent led me to an epiphany once. How did the TV character Herman Munster get his name? Somebody had ordered a ham and Muenster from Sam the Deli Man. Now you know.

Salami on a roll, yet not a Samwich. Can you spot the clues?

He would forget your order three or four times while you stood there. But he was professional about that. “Sorry, not to keep you waiting, but that was a turkey and cheddar?”

“Turkey and Swiss.”

“A little mustard, a little mayo?”

“Mustard.”

And a few minutes later, “Turkey and cheese,” he’d say to himself.

That was a warning to induce panic. It meant that he’d forgotten what kind of cheese. You might wind up with regular cheddar (awful), sharp cheddar (quite good), Swiss or Muenster. Or no cheese. You couldn’t know. So you’d say helpfully, “Swiss cheese,” then add, “With mustard.” Because in all likelihood, he’d forgotten that, too.

On the rare occasions when a customer requested mustard and mayo, Sam marveled. “A little of both? Sure, why not?” As if you‘d just suggested he stand on his head.

After a great deal of further ado, as Sam went back and forth behind the little counter and into and out of the storeroom behind, something resembling a sandwich would begin to appear. It would be several minutes more before the sandwich was finished, a perfect object, a masterpiece made to order.

Though I watched him closely, I was never sure how he managed to spend — and lose — the time. His movements generally were quick. He didn’t stop to take phone calls, and only rarely did he make conversation with the customers.

But he never seemed to have precisely what he needed to prepare a sandwich without interruption. And he was very particular about arrangements. Each meat must be in its place, and rewrapped after being sliced, before he would set the slices on the roll. The mustard must be applied with a specific gesture. And the whole question of whether the roll would be sliced occasioned an internal philosophical debate from which he could take minutes to emerge before turning to you for an answer.

“Pardon me, not to keep you waiting, but do you mind if I leave that unsliced?”

Heaven only knows what he’d have done if he’d had more ingredients to offer his customers, but it was only meat and cheese, rye or roll, mustard or mayo. He eschewed lettuce and tomato, or any fancier garnish, and according to Steve, the tale behind his decision not to stock roast beef was a saga requiring at least 10 or 20 minutes, though I never heard it.

The Brown Campus: In an unofficial yet very real sense,
Sam was affiliated with the University.

Sam did have stories, which he shared when the mood struck him, and indeed we endured his distractions and delays not because he was a comical elf, but because he was an authentic character, an artist. Though most of us were faceless to him, we were certain that he prepared his sandwiches with love — love of his craft, and maybe even love for us.

Steve got the proof of that. Nobody admired Sam more than Steve did, no one was more patient with him, no one understood him better. And over time, it seemed — was it possible? — that Sam recognized Steve, and looked forward to his visits. (Indeed, I tried to schedule my visits to coincide with Steve’s: Sam was more attentive to me then, his sandwiches more generous.)

On graduation day, the Brown community and much of Providence line Waterman Street to cheer on the graduating class. And so, as the becapped and begowned Steve Biel marched down the street in 1983, a hand shot out of the crowd.

“Congratulations,” said Sam, grabbing Steve’s hand. “I’m very proud of you.”

Steve began to cry, of course, and even today, I get choked up as I recall that scene.

My most intimate conversation with Sam came one rainy afternoon in May, 1982. Although the weather earlier in the week promised much, and delivered my Most Romantic Moment at Brown (a moonlit night on Prospect Street, when I reached up to pluck from a stranger’s yard the lilac blossom requested by Karen Prager, the girl I took to the dance), the night of the Campus Dance was a soggy catastrophe. Providence is famous for its precipitation; in the words of a popular greeting card that dates to the 1970s, “…it rains two days out of three, except during the rainy season, when it snows like a bitch.” Yet even by that standard, the deluge of Campus Dance 1982 commanded respect.

Evidently, Campus Dance 2007 was dryer than 1982.

People were still talking about it the next day, and late in the afternoon, I stopped into Sam’s for a sandwich. We were alone, at that hour, and Sam was in an expansive mood — the most expansive I’d seen. “Pardon me, not to keep you waiting, but are you affiliated with the University?” he said.

I answered that I was, and he continued, “And did you attend the Campus Dance?” Yes, I had.

Too bad about all the rain, Sam said. But this was not merely a conversation about the weather, for, to my great surprise, he kept going — farther into the past.

“Of course, the Campus Dance these days isn’t like what it used to be. All the rock’n’roll and the shaking. When I used to go to Campus Dance, the music was beautiful, and we danced real dances. And the women wore beautiful clothes. Not like today.”

Sam used to go to Campus Dance? “Yes, with my wife — not my present wife, my first wife,” he said. The present wife was a redheaded harridan who sat in the shop on Sundays and bossed Sam and every customer mercilessly. We knew that there had been a previous wife, but we knew nothing about her. As Sam went on, I pictured her, petite and dark-haired and sweet-eyed, a lovely dancer in his arms as they swept across the Green.

“They used to decorate the whole campus,” he said, “with colored lights and lanterns and flowers.” He went on at greater length, painting the scene for me, before concluding, “Oh, it was beautiful. It was like something you would see.”

He stared into the past, and through his eyes, I could see it, too. I think we’d both forgotten about my sandwich.

He died right around graduation time, a few years later. I hadn’t gone up to Providence for reunion, but Elise Goyette had, and after what I am told was a considerable discussion, she was elected to break the news to me. She sat me down and placed a hand on my shoulder. And I knew. Sam was gone.

Is the loss of him one reason I didn’t return to Providence for a decade? What, after all, would be the point, if I couldn’t get a Samwich and a Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry Soda and sit for lazy hours in the sunshine on the Green? How would I know where I was?

Or, for that matter, who I was? I transplanted myself to the Northeast, after all, and one way I took root there was to return to favorite spots — the Excelsior, Sam’s deli — again and again. They were familiar, they were special, and they were in some sense mine. They helped to create a new identity: Bill the Grownup. Bill the Brown Grad. Bill the New Yorker.

I have no pictures of Sylvia, as I say, and none of Sam, and damn few of that younger Bill I used to be. I can’t return to the places where we dwelt, I can’t eat the foods they served me. All I can do is remember — and tell the stories.

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The Crows of Montmartre

Awaiting the next sortie: A few of my neighbors

My apartment overlooks the Montmartre Cemetery. The usual joke is that at least the neighbors are quiet, but the reality is otherwise. Apart from the glorious dead, the cemetery is home to living — and noisy — creatures, including several flocks of crows.

Crows are carrion birds, and for that reason, I always thought they must be a little confused. After all, the pickings must be slim when all the best material is six feet underground and covered over with a marble slab, or else residing in a tightly locked mausoleum, of which Montmartre has many. Surely they’d be better off elsewhere. This morning, however, I witnessed a scene that persuaded me that the crows must be in the right place, after all.

I chanced to look out my window into the street, a dead-end that backs into one of the cemetery walls. Below me, one of the local cats was scurrying toward the graveyard, a pigeon in his jaws. With agility that seemed somehow more than catlike, he scaled the wall, never dropping his prey.

This did not escape the attention of the crows, who began one of the angriest choruses of cawing I’ve heard from them during my time in Paris. They began to circle and to perch briefly in the overlooking trees — clearly preparing to attack or to scavenge, as circumstances required.

The cat was not thrilled by either prospect. He ran for cover behind one grave, then another, the pigeon fluttering its wings but unable to escape. The crows became louder and, as their numbers increased, more menacing. At last the cat ducked under the base of a mausoleum, and in a second or two — much to my surprise — the pigeon emerged, spread its wings and began to fly away.

The crows were not satisfied by this demonstration of the pigeon’s vitality, and tested it by chasing the bird back and forth across this corner of the cemetery for a couple of minutes. When it became clear that the pigeon was in no immediate danger of dying, the crows returned to the treetops, where they discussed the matter at some length.

That’s when I snapped a few photos, to commemorate the event. For those who doubted that Paris was a savage jungle, you know better now.

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April Fish

Here in France, the symbol of April Fool’s is a fish, to the point of shouting out, “Poisson d’avril!” when you play a trick on someone. You’re also expected to give fish to people. This explains the presence of chocolate fish in French candy shops (including, bien sûr, Denise Acabo’s), alongside the chocolate Easter bunnies and eggs more readily recognizable to Americans.

In the spirit of the season, I recently completed Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style, the short, simple story of an encounter on a Parisian bus, recounted 99 different ways. Many of these are amusing, all of them are clever, but it must be said that a single variation more and I’d have thrown the book out the window. Style is one thing, but on occasion one wants substance.

Happily, Queneau provided just that in a real novel, Zazie dans le Métro. In it, a 10-year-old girl wreaks havoc during a weekend in Paris. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, surreal, anarchic, brilliant — and prophetic. Because the book was published in 1959, it takes only simple math to realize that the hellion Zazie was exactly the right age to be a student rioter in 1968. Queneau did try to warn us, but the French are still recovering from May 1968 and its many Zazies, and the fortieth anniversary is the headline on almost every French magazine right now.

Hell hath no fury like a 10-year-old French girl:
Catherine Mongeot, star of Louis Malle’s Zazie film

To honor the season further, I am writing this several days after April 1. But more urgently, perhaps, I note that April also marks tax season — perhaps the biggest and most durable April Fool anybody ever played. And it’s the subject of the happy discovery I made while perusing Mark Twain last night.

Income taxes are not something I’d have expected Twain to know much about, yet his experience of them — in 1870 — turns out to be exhaustive and authoritative. Further proof that Twain is very much our contemporary. In his sketch, “A Mysterious Visit” (which can be found in Volume I of the Library of America’s indispensable collection of short pieces by Twain), he recounts his attempts to impress a stranger. According to Twain, “impress” usually means “exaggerate,” and he inflates his financial worth to figures that are eye-catching even today. Never mind that the guy introduced himself as an agent of the Internal Revenue Service — whatever that is.

“We talked, and talked, and talked — at least I did. And we laughed, and laughed, and laughed — at least he did,” Twain recalls. “Then the gentleman got up to go. It came over me most uncomfortably that maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into stretching them considerably by the stranger’s astonished exclamations. But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope and said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom — would in fact be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income; and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in Buffalo, but when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely hard enough to live on; and that in truth it had been such a weary, weary age since he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked with him, and touched him with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing me — in fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.”

Tax Expert: Mark Twain,
a.k.a. Samuel “Long Form” Clemens

The “advertisement” turns out, of course, to be “nothing in the world but a wicked tax return — a string of impertinent questions about my private affairs occupying the best part of four foolscap pages of fine print — questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn’t understand what the most of them were driving at — questions, too, that were calculated to make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from swearing a lie.”

How Twain wiggles his way out of this mess is something I urge you to read for yourself — although with equal force I urge you not to follow his example.

Happy April, everybody.

Note: For unknown reasons, Amazon appears to be aware of the existence only of Volume II of LOA’s collection of Twain sketches. To get both volumes, one must go to the source — or to the bookstore.

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