God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Read online

  The report contained Eliot's speech to the writers word-for-word. The meeting, including Eliot's drunken interruption, had been taken down on tape.

  "I love you sons of bitches," Eliot said in Milford. "You're all I read any more. You're the only ones who'll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

  Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. "The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born."

  "I only wish Kilgore Trout were here," said Eliot, "so I could shake his hand and tell him that he is the greatest writer alive today. I have just been told that he could not come because he could not afford to leave his job! And what job does this society give its greatest prophet?" Eliot choked up, and, for a few moments, he couldn't make himself name Trout's job. "They have made him a stock clerk in a trading stamp redemption center in Hyannis!"

  This was true. Trout, the author of eighty-seven paperback books, was a very poor man, and unknown outside the science-fiction field. He was sixty-six years old when Eliot spoke so warmly of him.

  "Ten thousand years from now," Eliot predicted boozily, "the names of our generals and presidents will be forgotten, and the only hero of our time still remembered will be the author of 2BRO2B." This was the title of a book by Trout, a title which, upon examination, turned out to be the famous question posed by Hamlet.

  Mushari dutifully went looking for a copy of the book for his dossier on Eliot. No reputable bookseller had ever heard of Trout. Mushari made his last try at a smut-dealer's hole in the wall. There, amidst the rawest pornography, he found tattered copies of every book Trout had ever written. 2BRO2B, which had been published at twenty-five cents, cost him five dollars, which was what The Kama Sutra of Vitsayana cost, too.

  Mushari glanced through the Kama Sutra, the long-suppressed oriental manual on the art and techniques of love, read this:

  If a man makes a sort of jelly with the juices of the fruit cassia fistula and eugenie jambolina and mixes the powder of the plants soma, veronia anthelminica, eclipta prostata, lohopa-juihirka, and applies this mixture to the yoni of a woman with whom he is about to have intercourse, he will instantly cease to love her.

  Mushari didn't see anything funny in that. He never saw anything funny in anything, so deeply immured was he by the utterly unplayful spirit of the law.

  And he was witless enough, too, to imagine that Trout's books were very dirty books, since they were sold for such high prices to such queer people in such a place. He didn't understand that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.

  So Mushari felt swindled as he wallowed through the garish prose, lusted for sex, learned instead about automation. Trout's favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BRO2B he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D's. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too.

  All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard John-son's. There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door.

  And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination.

  One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, "Certainly, honey."

  And he said, "I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here."

  "What's that?" she said, strapping him in.

  "What in hell are people for?"

  In Milford, Eliot told the writers that he wished they would learn more about sex and economics and style, but then he supposed that people dealing with really big issues didn't have much time for such things.

  And it occurred to him that a really good science-fiction book had never been written about money. "Just think of the wild ways money is passed around on Earth!" he said. "You don't have to go to the Planet Tralfamadore in Anti-Matter Galaxy 508 G to find weird creatures with unbelievable powers. Look at the powers of an Earthling millionaire! Look at me! I was born naked, just like you, but my God, friends and neighbors, I have thousands of dollars a day to spend!"

  He paused to make a very impressive demonstration of his magical powers, writing a smeary check for two hundred dollars for every person there.

  "There's fantasy for you," he said. "And you go to the bank tomorrow, and it will all come true. It's insane that I should be able to do such a thing, with money so important." He lost his balance for a moment, regained it, and then nearly fell asleep on his feet. He opened his eyes with great effort. "I leave it to you, friends and neighbors, and especially to the immortal Kilgore Trout: think about the silly ways money gets passed around now, and then think up better ways."

  Eliot lurched away from Milford, hitchhiked to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He went into a small bar there, announced that anyone who could produce a volunteer fireman's badge could drink with him free. He built gradually to a crying jag, during which he claimed to be deeply touched by the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to combine violently with almost everything the inhabitants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen.

  "When you think about it, boys," he said brokenly, "that's what holds us together more than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers--joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen. I tell you, boys, I used to belong to a volunteer fire department, and I'd belong to one now, if there were such a human thing, such a humane thing, in New York City." This was bunk about Eliot's having been a fireman. The closest he had ever come to that was during his annual childhood visits to Rosewater County, to the family fief. Sycophants among the townies had flattered little Eliot by making him mascot of the Volunteer Fire Department of Rosewater. He had never fought a fire.

  "I tell you, boys," he went on, "if those Russian landing barges come barging in some day, and there isn't any way to stop 'em, all the phony bastards who get all the good jobs in this country by kissing ass will be down to meet the conquerers with vodka and caviar, offering to do any kind of work the Russians have in mind. And you know who'll take to the woods with hunting knives and Springfields, who'll go on fighting for a hundred years, by God? The volunteer firemen, that's who."

  Eliot was locked up in Swarthmore on a drunk and disorderly charge. When he awoke the next morning, the police called his wife. He apologized to her, slunk home.

  But he was off again in a month, carousing with firemen in Clover Lick, West Virginia, one night, and in New Egypt, New Jersey, the
next. And on that trip he traded clothes with another man, swapped a four-hundred-dollar suit for a 1939 double-breasted blue chalkstripe, with shoulders like Gibraltar, lapels like the wings of the Archangel Gabriel, and with the creases in the trousers permanently sewed in.

  "You must be crazy," said the New Egypt fireman.

  "I don't want to look like me," Eliot replied. "I want to look like you. You're the salt of the earth, by God. You're what's good about America, men in suits like that. You're the soul of the U.S. Infantry."

  And Eliot eventually traded away everything in his wardrobe but his tails, his dinner jacket, and one gray flannel suit. His sixteen-foot closet became a depressing museum of coveralls, overalls, Robert Hall Easter specials, field jackets, Eisenhower jackets, sweatshirts and so on. Sylvia wanted to burn them, but Eliot told her, "Burn my tails, my dinner jacket and my gray flannel suit instead."

  Eliot was a flamboyantly sick man, even then, but there was no one to hustle him off for treatment, and no one was as yet entranced by the profits to be made in proving him insane. Little Norman Mushari was only twelve in those troubled days, was assembling plastic model airplanes, masturbating, and papering his room with pictures of Senator Joe Mc-Carthy and Roy Cohn. Eliot Rosewater was the farthest thing from his mind.

  Sylvia, raised among rich and charming eccentrics, was too European to have him put away. And the Senator was in the political fight of his life, rallying the Republican forces of reaction that had been shattered by the election of Dwight David Eisenhower. When told of his son's bizarre way of life, the Senator refused to worry, on the grounds that the boy was well-bred. "He's got fiber, he's got spine," the Senator said. "He's experimenting. He'll come back to his senses any time he's good and ready. This family never produced and never will produce a chronic drunk or a chronic lunatic."

  Having said that, he went into the Senate Chamber to deliver his fairly famous speech on the Golden Age of Rome, in which he said, in part:

  I should like to speak of the Emperor Octavian, of Caesar Augustus, as he came to be known. This great humanitarian, and he was a humanitarian in the profoundest sense of the word, took command of the Roman Empire in a degenerate period strikingly like our own. Harlotry, divorce, alcoholism, liberalism, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, venality, murder, labor racketeering, juvenile delinquency, cowardice, atheism, extortion, slander, and theft were the height of fashion. Rome was a paradise for gangsters, perverts, and the lazy working man, just as America is now. As in America now, forces of law and order were openly attacked by mobs, children were disobedient, had no respect for their parents or their country, and no decent woman was safe on any street, even at high noon! And cunning, sharp-trading, bribing foreigners were in the ascendency everywhere. And ground under the heels of the big city money-changers were the honest farmers, the backbone of the Roman Army and the Roman soul.

  What could be done? Well, there were soft-headed liberals then as there are bubble-headed liberals now, and they said what liberals always say after they have led a great nation to such a lawless, self-indulgent, polyglot condition: "Things have never been better! Look at all the freedom! Look at all the equality! Look how sexual hypocrisy has been driven from the scene! Oh boy! People used to get all knotted up inside when they thought about rape or fornication. Now they can do both with glee!"

  And what did the terrible, black-spirited, non-fun-loving conservatives of those happy days have to say? Well, there weren't many of them left. They were dying off in ridiculed old age. And their children had been turned against them by the liberals, by the purveyors of synthetic sunshine and moonshine, by the something-for-nothing political strip-teasers, by the people who loved everybody, including the barbarians, by people who loved the barbarians so much they wanted to open all the gates, have all the soldiers lay their weapons down, and let the barbarians come in!

  That was the Rome that Caesar Augustus came home to, after defeating those two sex maniacs, Antony and Cleopatra, in the great sea battle of Actium. And I don't think I have to re-create the things he thought when he surveyed the Rome he was said to rule. Let us take a moment of silence, and let each think what he will of the stews of today.

  There was a moment of silence, too, about thirty seconds that seemed to some like a thousand years.

  And what methods did Caesar Augustus use to put this disorderly house in order? He did what we are so often told we must never, ever do, what we are told will never, ever work: he wrote morals into law, and he enforced those unenforceable laws with a police force that was cruel and unsmiling. He made it illegal for a Roman to behave like a pig. Do you hear me? It became illegal! And Romans caught acting like pigs were strung up by their thumbs, thrown down wells, fed to lions, and given other experiences that might impress them with the desirability of being more decent and reliable than they were. Did it work? You bet your boots it did! Pigs miraculously disappeared! And what do we call the period that followed this now-unthinkable oppression? Nothing more nor less, friends and neighbors, than "The Golden Age of Rome."

  Am I suggesting that we follow this gory example? Of course I am. Scarcely a day has passed during which I have not said in one way or another: "Let us force Americans to be as good as they should be." Am I in favor of feeding labor crooks to lions? Well, to give those who get such satisfaction from imagining that I am covered with primordial scales a little twinge of pleasure, let me say, "Yes. Absolutely. This afternoon, if it can be arranged." To disappoint my critics, let me add that I am only fooling. I am not entertained by cruel and unusual punishments, not in the least. I am fascinated by the fact that a carrot and a stick can make a donkey go, and that his Space Age discovery may have some application in the world of human beings.

  And so on. The Senator said that the carrot and the stick had been built into the Free Enterprise System, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, but that do-gooders, who thought people shouldn't ever have to struggle for anything, had buggered the logic of the system beyond all recognition.

  In summation: he said, I see two alternatives before us. We can write morals into law, and enforce those morals harshly, or we can return to a true Free Enterprise System, which has the sink-or-swim justice of Caesar Augustus built into it. I emphatically favor the latter alternative. We must be hard, for we must become again a nation of swimmers, with the sinkers quietly disposing of themselves. I have spoken of another hard time in ancient history. In case you have forgotten the name of it, I shall refresh your memories: "The Golden Age of Rome," friends and neighbors, "The Golden Age of Rome."

  As for friends who might have helped Eliot through his time of troubles: he didn't have any. He drove away his rich friends by telling them that whatever they had was based on dumb luck. He advised his artist friends that the only people who paid any attention to what they did were rich horses' asses with nothing more athletic to do. He asked his scholarly friends, "Who has time to read all the boring crap you write and listen to all the boring things you say?" He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.

  And then Eliot entered psychoanalysis. He swore off drinking, took pride in his appearance again, expressed enthusiasm for the arts and sciences, won back many friends.

  Sylvia was never happier. But then, one year after the treatments had begun, she was astonished by a call from the analyst. He was resigning the case because, in his taut Viennese opinion, Eliot was untreatable.

  "But you've cured him!"

  "If I were a Los Angeles quack, dear lady, I would most demurely agree. However, I am not a Swami. Your husband has the most massively defended neurosis I have ever attempted to treat. What the nature of that neurosis is I can't imagine. In one solid year of work, I have not succeeded in even scratching its armor plate."

  "But he always comes home from your
office so cheerful!"

  "Do you know what we talk about?"

  "I thought it better not to ask."

  "American history! Here is a very sick man, who, among other things, killed his mother, who has a terrifying tyrant for a father. And what does he talk about when I invite him to let his mind wander where it will? American history."

  The statement that Eliot had killed his beloved mother was, in a crude way, true. When he was nineteen, he took his mother for a sail in Cotuit Harbor. He jibed. The slashing boom knocked his mother overboard. Eunice Morgan Rosewater sank like a stone.

  "I ask him what he dreams about," the doctor continued, "and he tells me, 'Samuel Gompers, Mark Twain, and Alexander Hamilton.' I ask him if his father ever appears in his dreams, and he says, 'No, but Thorsten Veblen often does.' Mrs. Rosewater, I'm defeated. I resign."

  Eliot seemed merely amused by the doctor's dismissal. "It's a cure he doesn't understand, so he refuses to admit it's a cure," he said lightly.

  That evening, he and Sylvia went to the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of a new staging of Aida. The Rosewater Foundation had paid for the costumes. Eliot looked sleekly marvelous, tall, tailcoated, his big, friendly face pink, and his blue eyes glittering with mental hygiene.

  Everything was fine until the last scene of the opera, during which the hero and heroine were placed in an airtight chamber to suffocate. As the doomed pair filled their lungs, Eliot called out to them, "You will last a lot longer, if you don't try to sing." Eliot stood, leaned far out of his box, told the singers, "Maybe you don't know anything about oxygen, but I do. Believe me, you must not sing."

  Eliot's face went white and blank. Sylvia plucked at his sleeve. He looked at her dazedly, then permitted her to lead him away as easily as she might have led a toy balloon.