TWO
Eliot Rosewater was born in 1918, in Washington, D.C. Like his father, who claimed to
represent the Hoosier State, Eliot was raised and educated and entertained on the Eastern Seaboard
and in Europe. The family visited the so-called "home" in Rosewater County very briefly every
year, just long enough to reinvigorate the lie that it was home.
Eliot had unremarkable academic careers at Loomis and Harvard. He became an expert sailor
during summers in Cotuit, on Cape Cod, and an intermediate skier during winter vacations in
Switzerland.
He left Harvard Law School on December 8, 1941, to volunteer for the Infantry of the Army
of the United States. He served with distinction in many battles. He rose to the rank of captain,
was a company commander. Near the end of the war in Europe, Eliot suffered what was diagnosed as
combat fatigue. He was hospitalized in Paris, where he wooed and won Sylvia.
After the war, Eliot returned to Harvard with his stunning wife, took his law degree. He
went on to specialize in international law, dreamed of helping the United Nations in some way. He
received a doctorate in that field, and was handed simultaneously the presidency of the new
Rosewater Foundation. His duties, according to the charter, were exactly as flimsy or as
formidable as he himself declared them to be.
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 clays 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 years old when Eliot spoke so warmly
of him.
"Ten thousand years from now," Eliot predicted boozily, "the names of our generals and
presidents will be forgotten, and the only hero of our time still remembered will be the author of
2BRO2B." This was the title of a book by Trout, a title which, upon examination, turned out to be
the famous question posed by Hamlet.
*
Mushari dutifully went looking for a copy of the book for his dossier on Eliot. No
reputable bookseller had ever heard of Trout. Mushari made his last try at a smut-dealer's hole in
the wall. There, amidst the rawest pornography, he found tattered copies of every book Trout had
ever written. 2BRO2B, which had been published at twenty-five cents, cost him five dollars, which
was what _The Kama Sutra of Vitsayana_ cost, too.
