So I completely rewrote the story, lengthening it a good deal, placing it against the Black Widower background, and now I feel ever so much better. Especially since now my solution is included.
12. Out of Sight
The monthly banquet of the Black Widowers had reached the point where little was left of the mixed grill save for an occasional sausage and a markedly untouched piece of liver on the plate of Emmanuel Rubin-and it was then that voices rose in Homeric combat.
Rubin, undoubtedly infuriated by the presence of liver at all, was saying, even more flatly than was usual for him, "Poetry is sound. You don't look at poetry. I don't care whether a culture emphasizes rhyme, alliteration, repetition, balance, or cadence, it all comes down to sound."
Roger Halsted never raised his voice, but one could always tell the state of his emotions by the color of his high forehead. Right now, it was a deep pink, the color extending past the line that had once marked hair. He said, "What's the use of making generalizations, Manny? No generalization can hold generally without an airtight system of axiomatics to begin with. Literature-"
"If you're going to tell me about figurative verse," said Rubin body, "save your breath. That's Victorian nonsense."
"What's figurative verse?" asked Mario Gonzalo lazily. "Is he making that up, Jeff?" He added a touch to the tousled hair in his careful caricature of the banquet guest, Waldemar Long, who, since the dinner had begun, had eaten in a somber silence, but was obviously following every word.
"No," said Geoffrey Avalon judiciously, "though I wouldn't put it past Manny to make something up if that were the only way he could win an argument. Figurative verse is verse in which the words or lines are arranged typographically in such a way as to produce a visual image that reinforces the sense. 'The Mouse's Tail' in Alice in Wonderland is the best-known example."
Halsted's soft voice was unequal to the free-for-all and he methodically beat his spoon against the water goblet till the decibels had simmered down.
He said, "Let's be reasonable. The subject under discussion is not poetry in general, but the limerick as a verse form. My point is this-I'll repeat it, Manny-that the worth of a limerick is not dictated by its subject matter. It's easier-"
James Drake stubbed out his cigarette, twitched his small grizzled mustache, and said in his hoarse voice, "Why do you call a dirty limerick dirty? The Supreme Court will get you."
Halsted said, "Because it's a two-syllable word with a meaning you all understand. What do you want me to say? Sexual-excretory-blasphemous-and-miscellaneous-generally-irreverent?"
Avalon said, "Go on, Roger. Go on. Make your point and don't let them needle you." And, from under his luxuriant eyebrows, he frowned austerely at the table generally. "Let him talk."
"Why?" said Rubin. "He has nothing to… Okay, Jeff. Talk, Roger."
"Thank you all," said Halsted, in the wounded tone of one who has finally succeeded in having his wrong recognized. "The worth of a limerick rests in the unpredictability of the last line and in the cleverness of the final rhyme. In fact, irreverent content may seem to have value in itself and require less cleverness-and produce a less worthwhile limerick, as limerick. Now it is possible to have the rhyme masked by the orthographical conventions."
"What?" said Gonzalo. "Spelling," said Avalon.
"And then," said Halsted, "in seeing the spelling and having that instant of delay in getting the sound, you intensify the enjoyment. But under those conditions you have to see the limerick. If you just recite it, the excellence is lost."
"Suppose you give us an example," said Drake.
"I know what he means," said Rubin loudly. "He's going to rhyme M.A. and C.D.-Master of Arts and Caster of Darts."
"That's an example that's been used," admitted Halsted, "but it's extreme. It takes too long to catch on and amusement is drowned in irritation. As it happens, I've made up a Limerick while we were having the argument-"
And now, for the first time, Thomas Trumbull entered this part of the discussion. His tanned and wrinkled face twisted into a dark scowl and he said, "The hell you did. You made it up yesterday and you engineered this whole silly nonsense so you could recite it. If it's one of your Iliad things, I'll personally kick you out of here."
"It's not the Iliad," said Halsted. "I haven't been working on that recently. It's no use my reciting this one, of course. I'll write it down and pass it around."
He wrote in dark block letters on an unused napkin:
Gonzalo laughed aloud when it came too him. He said, "Sure, if you know that MS is pronounced Miz, then you pronounce LS as Liz."
"To me," said Drake scornfully, "LS would have to stand for 'lanuscript' if it's going to rhyme with MS."
Avalon pursed his lips and shook his head. "Using TAIN'T is a flaw. You ought to lose a syllable some other way. And to be perfectly consistent, shouldn't the rhyme word IS be spelled simply S?"
Halsted nodded eagerly. "You're quite right, and I thought of doing that, but it wouldn't be transparent
enough and the reader wouldn't get it fast enough to laugh. Secondly, it would be the cleverest part of the limerick and would make the LS anticlimactic."
"Do you really have to waste all that fancy reasoning on a piece of crap like this?" asked Trumbull.
"I think I've made my point," said Halsted. "The humor can be visual."
Trumbull said, "Well, then, drop the subject. Since I'm host this session, that's an order… Henry, where's the damned dessert?"
"It's here, sir," said Henry softly. Unmoved by Trum-bull's tone, he deftly cleared the table and dealt out the blueberry shortcake.
The coffee had already been poured and Trumbull's guest said in a low voice, "May I have tea, please?"
The guest had a long upper lip and an equally long chin. The hair on his head was shaggy but there was none on his face and he had walked with a somewhat bearlike stoop. When he was first introduced, only Rubin had registered any recognition.
He had said, "Aren't you with NASA?"
Waldemar Long had answered with a startled "Yes" as though he had been disturbed out of a half-resentful resignation to anonymity. He had then frowned. He was frowning now again as Henry poured the tea and melted unobtrusively into the background.
Trumbull said, "I think the time has come for our guest to enter the discussion and perhaps add some portion of sense to what has been an unusually foolish evening."
"No, that's all right, Tom," said Long. "I don't mind frivolity." He had a deep and rather beautiful voice that had a definite note of sadness in it. He went on, "I have no aptitude for badinage myself, but I enjoy listening to it."
Halsted, still brooding over the matter of the limericks, said, with sudden forcefulness, "I suggest Manny not be the grill master on this occasion."
"No?" said Rubin, his sparse beard lifting belligerently.
"No. I put it to you, Tom. If Manny questions our
guest, he will surely bring up the space program since there's a NASA connection. Then we will go through the same darned argument we've had a hundred times. I'm sick of the whole subject of space and whether we ought to be on the moon."
"Not half as sick as I am," said Long, rather unexpectedly, "I'd just as soon not discuss any aspect of space exploration."