God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
Eliot chose to take the Foundation seriously. He bought a town house in New York, with a fountain in the foyer. He put a Bentley and a Jaguar in the garage. He hired a suite of offices in the Empire State Building. He had them painted lime, burnt-orange and oyster white. He proclaimed them the headquarters for all the beautiful, compassionate and scientific things he hoped to do.
He was a heavy drinker, but no one worried about it. No amount of booze seemed to make him drunk.
From 1947 until 1953, the Rosewater Foundation spent fourteen million dollars. Eliot's benefactions covered the full eleemosynary spectrum from a birth control clinic in Detroit to an El Greco for Tampa, Florida. Rosewater dollars fought cancer and mental illness and race prejudice and police brutality and countless other miseries, encouraged college professors to look for truth, bought beauty at any price.
Ironically, one of the studies Eliot paid for had to do with alcoholism in San Diego. When the report was submitted, Eliot was too drunk to read it. Sylvia had to come down to his office to escort him home. A hundred people saw her trying to lead him across the sidewalk to a waiting cab. And Eliot recited for them a couplet he had spent all morning composing:
"Many, many good things have I bought! Many, many bad things have I fought!"
Eliot stayed contritely sober for two days after that, then disappeared for a week. Among other things, he crashed a convention of science-fiction writers in a motel in Milford, Pennsylvania. Norman Mushari learned about this episode from a private detective's report that was in the files of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. Old McAllister had hired the detective to retrace Eliot's steps, to find out if he had done things that might later legally embarrass the Foundation.
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