STANLEY ELKIN

The 1987 Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture: What's in a Name?

Professor Adams, thank you for your kind introduction. You're very generous.

Chancellor Jones, Dean Smith, members of the faculty, students, ladies and gentlemen....

As Professor Adams has already told you, my name is Stanley. Could you be mugged by a Stanley? Could a Stanley rape you? Tops, I might molest your kid, but you'd never know it, and neither would she. What, a little suntan lotion rubbed along the bottom of her swimsuit like a piping of frosting around a birthday cake? What, a spot of spilled tea on the sunsuit, my finger in the bespittled handkerchief moist from what it wouldn't even occur to you was drool before it was saliva, and vigorously brushing across what won't be breasts for another half dozen years yet, my grunt the two- or three-tone guttural hum of deflection, nervous and oddly dapper as the tugs, pats and twitches of a standup comic, distracting as the shot cuffs of magicians and cardsharps, all random melody's tangential rove? Because how could you ever even guess at my intentions and interiors, my inner landscapes and incisor lusts, the thickening at my throat like hidden shim, the ponderous stirrings of my ice-floe blood, deep as resource, buried as oil in my gnarled and knotty groin, my clotted sexual circuits? Could put it past you plenty, believe me, holding the kid's shoulder, the little girl's, for the leverage, drawing her within the fork of my white old thighs, a pervert like a master artisan, fixing her there like a piece of carpentry. Or violating her in absentia, my eyes on her kindergarten picture, my snoot in her laundry, in her eight-year-old grimes. All contacts troubled, gone off, amok but deceptive, accidental, clever as a pickpocket's.

According to the terms of their bequest, the Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture is given in odd-numbered years of even-numbered decades of odd-numbered centuries. The 1987 lecture was delivered on March 24, 1987, at Case Western University.

Protected by reputation, see, my triumph of the human-spirit spirit, that heart of gold which I don't possess but people attribute to me anyway, mistaking cholesterol for karats, hypertension for love, innocence by association, by stereotype, dismissing me finally, all the world waving me through Customs like that guy in the audience at the night club whose lap the chanteuse sits in, kissing his bald spot, pinching his cheek, and telling folks what a good sport he is, leading the applause.

Protected finally by all my grotesque cuddlies— the limp, the cane, my toothless, grampsy ways, my fatty's belly and threatless aura, my ducky's waddle and feeble's klutz, my Stanleyness on me like a wimp heraldries. Hey, I'm kidding. Only offering credential here, only flashing badge, showing my hand, franked under the ultraviolet like a kid's at the dance.

Stanley is as Stanley does and you are what you're called.

Stanley is your brother-in-law, your CPA, your cousin in Drapes. He collects stamps, washes his car, belongs to Triple A, and keeps a weather eye on the gas mileage. He is, that is, as all of us are, the fiction of his sound, all his recombinant glottals, labials, fricatives and plosives. He's his flaps and trills. He's his spirants, I mean. He is, I mean, the vibrations of his name.

For great characters demand great names. (Of writers I admire, only Henry James—itself a fine name—lumbers his characters with bad ones. I'm thinking of Henrietta Stackpole, I'm thinking of Ralph Touchett, of Fleda Vetch and Milly Theale. I'm thinking of Madam Merle, of Casper Goodwood, Pansy Osmond, and Hyacinth Robinson. I'm thinking of Margaret Thatcher.) Here's a roll call for you. Beowulf and the Wife of Bath. King Lear but not Titus Andronicus. Hamlet but not Garp. Snow White, Pinocchio, and Mary Poppins but not Cinderella. Peter Pan but not Captain Hook. R2D2, Han Solo, C3PO, and Obi-wan (Ben) Kenobi but not Princess Leia. Leopold Bloom but not Stephen Dedalus. (Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Rodgers and Hammerstein but not Weber and Rice.) Harry Morgan, Harry Bailey, Harry Angstrom, Harry Lime. J. R. Phil Esterhaus. Babbitt. Mr. Toots. John Jarndyce. Mr. Tulkinghorn. Flem Snopes. Will Varner. V. K. Ratliff. Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby. My Uncle Toby. Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon. Jiminy Cricket. Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker. Hazel Motes. Becky Sharp. Captain Dobbin like a reliable horse. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Julian Sorel. Swann and the Guermantes. Vautrin. Hans Castorp. Levin. Father Zossima. Bartleby. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Angel Clare, Old Goriot, Elizabeth Bennett and her four sisters. All the not-to-be-pronounced names of God.

I want to speak to you this evening about Louis Paul Pelgas, the first Director of Admissions at any school in the Thirteen Colonies Conference, but before I begin it will be necessary to provide you with some sometimes dense, and often apparently trivial, historical background.

Clifton College is, as many of you may know, a small liberal arts college in what are, quite literally, the outer edges of Pennsylvania. It is out of the way even for Norbiton, Pennsylvania, even for Chapel County. Look at a map. Surrounded on two sides by West Virginia in the extreme southwestern corner of what—it's that close to the West Virginia line, that close to the Ohio one—is referred to by its inhabitants as the "state" rather than the "commonwealth" of Pennsylvania (possibly to lend a little aura of the average to what is uncompromisingly an atypical part of the nation), Norbiton, like a heel in an old shoe, exactly snugs the perfect right angle in the tight corner where its western and southern borders meet.

This tiny portion of Pennsylvania had been unofficially a "state" since...