Joseph Roth on a deadly barbershop bore

I finally found something less than delightful about Joseph Roth's observations of Berlin. His descriptions of the mechanization of daily life in the 1920s seem a bit less fresh than his observations of people and institutions, but that's probably because such descriptions have grown familiar over the years.

But other observations are as fresh now as they were ninety years ago:

"Here in Germany expert understanding tends to go hand in hand with barely comprehensible jargonizing. Expertise lacks style, knowledge stammers just as if it were ignorance, and objectivity has no opinions."

And, funniest and most chilling of all, his long description of a nationalistic bore in a Berlin barbershop, of which I present just excerpts here:

"His sentences grow ever shorter, he rattles subjects together, his words puff out their chests and march: one-two, one-two. It’s a nightmare. ...

"The ginger-haired gentleman has killed off the summery singsong atmosphere in the barbershop with his crashing sentences. His voice rattles along like a yellow weathervane. ...

"His words rattle, clatter, and bang. Batteries, mortars, rifles, running fire, all come spewing out of his larynx. World wars slumber in his bosom. ...

"...Herr Trischke is silent. Who isn’t? Even the fly, buzzing in so summery a fashion a moment ago, now adheres lifelessly to the ceiling, awestruck. ...

"No motor rattle, no belt drive, no clatter of horses’ hooves. He is the trench digger, the wire cutter, the whetstone, the insect powder, the coffee machine, the guaranteed-infallible lighter, the dry fuse. Only:

"He’s my friend from way back. He’s the aunt who scoured me every Saturday with a stiff brush. He’s the Kratzbürste.

"My neighbor was a glazier. His wife was a scold. He’s my glazier’s whining wife.

"Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing.

"My schoolmate was at the head of the class, and he had an impeccably neat notebook: The man in the barbershop is the neat notebook of my school friend; my school master’s class log; simultaneous equations; a book of logarithms!

"He is my headmaster’s address at assembly; the kiss of my old-maid aunt; dinner with my guardian; an afternoon in an orphanage; a game of dominoes with my deaf grandfather.

"He is duty and decency, sour-smelling and clean.

"One does run into people like that, in our part of the world, even in midsummer. It feels like encountering a schoolbook in the middle of a suitcase packed for the beach."

Roth had an eye for grating bores that I could never develop if I spent the next thousand years on a nightly pirla hunt. He may be the funniest observer of human character since Theophrastus, and certainly the funniest I've read since S.J. Perelman called some whiny bore "the most oppressive nudnik that ever abraded an eardrum."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Who the hell is Arbogast?

Raymond Chandler liked the name Arbogast so much that he used it at least three times (The High Window, "Trouble Is My Business," Farewell, My Lovely). The hero of S.J. Perleman's detective-story spoof "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer" has his office in the Arbogast building.

Milton Arbogast is a private investigator in Robert Bloch's novel Psycho and a movie based on it that you may have heard of. And the guy in the Studebaker who picks up the hitchhiking Vince Parry in David Goodis' Dark Passage? You guessed it: He's another in the honorable line of crime- and horror-fictional Arbogasts.

Arbogasts have been Frankish generals and Irish saints, but does anyone know why the humorously euphonious name (at least to non-Arbogasts) crops up so often in the work of celebrated crime writers? Have I missed any Arbogasts? What are your favorite odd character names in crime or other fiction?

  © Peter Rozovsky 2012