Читать книгу The Story I Am - Roger Rosenblatt - Страница 33

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

For much of my youth, my passion for language centered on lines from movies. There were certain things said in movies—old ones seen on TV, or new ones—that I cherished. Things I knew I wanted to hear again and again. I sought to incorporate them into my life, which is to say that I wanted to work them into normal conversations. Friends would be conducting a perfectly sensible chat, and I would be listening, like a lion in the brush, for an opportunity to slip in a line from, say, Beau Brummel (“Who’s your fat friend?”) or Double Indemnity (“There’s a widespread feeling that just because a man has a large office, he must be an idiot”) or Pal Beach Story (as said by Rudy Vallee to Mary Astor: “You know, Maude, someone meeting you for the first time, not knowing you were cracked, might get the wrong impression of you.” For that one, of course, one would have to wait to meet someone named Maude).

To be sure, this hobby of mine did not make me the ideal social companion, but this is how it is when career and popularity are in conflict. The “fat friend” line earned me the everlasting hatred of a plumpish boy in high school, who was standing beside a friend of mine when I tossed in my movie question. I tried to explain to him that I was merely quoting Stewart Granger as Beau Brummel when he was miffed with King George III, but the boy seemed uninterested.

The lines I chose were never the garden variety, such as “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” or “Frankly, my dear . . .” and so forth, but rather ones that had a special attraction for me. The other day I heard such a line in a movie called Jack Frost, in which someone who was attempting to rid the world of a colossal maniacal snowman, explained: “We tried blowing him up, but it only pissed him off.”

For many years, there were two lines I had never been able to slip into any conversation. The first of these, I never did get in. It occurred in Earthquake, one of the disaster films of the 1970s, in which a man was stalking a young woman to do terrible things to her. One would have thought that an earthquake would have been enough to divert his attention, but he was determined. At the height of the quake, he finally cornered his quarry and was about to jump her, when George Kennedy (a cop, of course) appeared, threw the attacker to the ground, and shot him dead. Consoling the shaking woman, Kennedy said: “I don’t know what it is. Earthquakes bring out the worst in some guys.”

The other line was much more unusual and exotic so it presented a much greater challenge. It was spoken by Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in one of the Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1940s when Watson was attempting to impress a couple on a ship who evidently were not familiar with Holmes’s exploits. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?” asked Watson, referring to one of the great detective’s most famous cases. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?”

Years, decades, passed, and I never came close to a moment when I might work in that line. The degree of difficulty was steep. There were so many elements to the Watson remark. If one heard an opening for the rat, there would still be the matter of its size. If the rat and the size were there, one still had to contend with Sumatra. Above these concerns stood the context. In order to make the question really fit a situation, the opening had to allow for an attitude of superior surprise. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?” Implying: “Who has not?”

In the late 1970s, I was writing for The Washington Post, and I had all but given up on my quest. In all those intervening years not a single conversation had come remotely close to offering me my longed-for opportunity. Then, one day, some friends and I went out to lunch, and it happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Mickey Mouse. There was some chatter at the table about Mickey, to which I had been paying scant attention—how much he had contributed to American culture. The usual harmless claptrap. Suddenly, one of the guys sat up with a quizzical look and asked, “Has there ever been a bigger rodent?”

{ column in The Washington Post }