ON BEING INTRODUCED

4 5 R O N B E I N G I N T R O D U C E D P A U L W E S T Once the person introducing me bit his tongue so badly that blood poured over his necktie onto the index card on which he had inscribed my entire life. Another time one of the more combative younger poets introduced a colleague in terms so stark and acidulous the speaker seemed struck dumb: ‘‘If I were you,’’ our host opined, ‘‘I’d go do something else, not listen to this genius’s gibberish ; he screws better than he writes.’’ One day at the University of Tulsa, my introducer actually read aloud my entire curriculum vitae, taking up some thirty minutes, smitten at the outset by parroty echolalia and devastating nerves. Even as he spoke, on and on, I ran a 2B pencil through paragraphs of comparable length in my speech. Indeed, given time enough, we could have exchanged roles completely; the introduction would have supplanted the speech. I cannot think why someone has not attempted this – suddenly the audience twigs it that the introducer is the real draw after all and the ostensible speaker is a figment, a ghost who will slink away when no one is looking. Stanley Elkin, never the master of the gentlest turn of phrase, used to pro√er an introduction of such glistening eloquence, such magisterial authority, such daunting length that the speaker, 4 6 W E S T Y humbled, only mumbled, aching to get o√ and away, not having been warned what he or she would have to follow. In the same neck of the woods, St. Louis, on the campus of Washington University , William H. Gass used to do a similar thing, reading an introduction even more resplendent than anything of Elkin’s, achieving something between encyclopedia entry and red-hot book review, leaving you more or less to flounder (or shine) in the afterglow, but with one plus: he left behind him a cloud of menthol and eucalyptus from the big to√ee on which he had sucked to clear his tubes. So even as you trotted up into that aroma and began, your sinuses behaved, and you excelled. Or choked by newly descended phlegm, you coughed on your finest phrases. Gass, that formidable introducer, had (no doubt still has) another trick, however. Having studied temptation, he lays on something you cannot resist, a treat for having sung for your supper – in my case a huge iced chocolate cake, perhaps to keep me from speaking ever again, such was its sleek sweet softness. You see how, as memory spins and serves things up, the worst evokes the best, calling in from the periphery of aversion the silliest goings-on. I have been introduced, in my time, as a former test pilot, a professional cricketer, and an expert on cheese. I have had the introducer who interrupts you halfway through to pose a question, the introducer who fell o√ his chair, having been driven to sleep by my speech, and the one who set me up as Paul Weiss. You never know what’s coming, what’s in the water, whether the reading light will work. Once at Binghamton University, mine host led me up several flights of steep stairs so that I arrived too breathless to speak, not that it mattered, anyway; we entered a room wholly in darkness, with nonetheless a murmur of people at the front and who knew how many behind them. The power had failed. So had the mike, the lights. He nonetheless maneuvered me into a chair in what I recalled as a Bob Hoskins motion from The Cotton Club (in which movie he is always positioning people) and began his introduction without a pause, getting the facts right and even paying tribute in the dark to things I’d written. I was then supposed to get on with my reading: no flashlight, no academic flare. For a few moments I fudged in the dark, heard appreciative glottal sounds, and stopped dead. Then the lights came on in dazzling anticlimax. O N B E I N G I N T...