Broken Necks/The Philosopher’s Benefit

"Have you anything especially important to do next Saturday night?" inquired Feodor Mishkin. The journalist's usually choleric voice was weary and his huge body sagged with the heat.

"Important, Mishkin? It all depends on how you use the adjective. I have long ago stopped doing important things."

"Don't try to talk to me philosophies, please. I ask you a simple question. Yes or no."

"Why?"

“Why! Why! I should know better than to try to talk to you on a hot day. If it was for me I wouldn't have bothered myself for a minute. Are you coming or not?"

"It all depends, Mishkin, on what and where you're talking about."

"The benefit! You haven't heard from the benefit? It don't matter how many years you are a newspaperman, you manage to keep ignorant of everything that's going on."

"So you are having a benefit?"

"I am having a benefit! Thanks. Who told you that? Please, if you're going to be insulting write some editorials. I am having no benefit. The benefit is for Lefkowitz's son."

"The one who is a philosopher?"

"The one who is a loafer, a dumb head and a fool. You and I have different opinions about people."

"What has happened to Lefkowitz's son that he is being given a benefit? Has he been run over?"

"Nothing has happened except that in another month he will starve to death and disgrace the West Side. The benefit is Saturday night and you can buy two tickets for $2. Bernstein's sisters are going to sing and—you'll enjoy."

"Who is giving the benefit, Mishkin? You?”

"Me! I should give benefits for such a fool like Lefkowitz's son. Who is giving the benefit? Nobody. He has forced it to be, that's all."

"But I thought he was so unpopular. You told me once."

"Listen, can you let a philosopher die no matter how unpopular he is? Unpopular? Yes? Everybody hates him. And why shouldn't they? When he goes to a Socialist picnic he makes a speech that the masses ain't of any consequence. When he attends a meeting in honor of Sholom Ash—you know who he is? The greatest dramatist in America. What does he do? He makes another speech saying the dramas he writes are fit for little children and no more. He's a philosopher, that's all."

"Why give him a benefit? Why not get him a job instead?"

"Lefkowitz's son a job? You are crazy, nothing else. Who will he work for? Simonson who wants to take him in his store he calls an idiot. And when they finally get him a job in the Public Library he starts insulting everybody who takes out a book he don't approve of. 'You must be without sense to waste your time,' he says, 'reading such kind of books,' he says, 'an intelligent man or woman wouldn't ask for such a book,' he says, 'why don't you read Leibnitz or somebody with some sense to him?' he says."

"Then why this concern about him. Why not let him go his own way, Mishkin, instead of bamboozling your friends into attending a benefit in his honor?"

"In his honor, aha! Who says he's going to get any honor? It's a benefit and if we raise a few hundred dollars everybody will be satisfied. As usual, you don't understand what I'm saying. I'm saying that Lefkowitz's son has been a philosopher for ten years. Everybody hates him because he insults them all and he looks down on everything they do and if you say anything he laughs in our face and answers you, ‘aha! What of it? Do you think such little things are important?' So what are you going to do?”?

"You are right, Mishkin, I don't understand the thing at all."

“It don't surprise me, so don't be so upset. If you were a member of the intelligentsia you would understand how it is embarrassing for a philosopher to starve to death in your back yard. Everybody is to him a commercial maniac. And everybody else is to him a low brow and a fool. And if you say to him, ‘go to work,' what does he answer you. ‘Ha, why should I work? Only fools work. I use my brain.' ”

“I begin to see, Mishkin. He has become a myth.”

"You begin to see! You are like Lefkowitz's son. You use your brain. The whole thing is that the West Side don't want it said that Lefkowitz's son, a great philosopher, had to die of starvation. That's all.”

"What has he written in the way of philosophy?"

"What has he written? Who says he writes? Nothing. Speeches insulting people, that's his philosophy writing. If you come Saturday night you can judge for yourself."

"He's going to recite something?"

"At his own benefit do you think he wouldn't recite? A lot you know of him. He's already read me the speech."

"It should be interesting listening to a pessimist unbend in grateful acknowledgements. I think I'll go.”

"You can stay away if you want to hear grateful acknowledgments. It's going to be a disgrace bigger than any he has made. The speech he has written and is going to recite is an insult to the whole human race. He takes for his subject the idea that he should be living in such a neighborhood that makes it necessary for a philosopher like him to have benefits given in order that he should be able to keep alive. The whole speech is about benefits like that."

"Mishkin, I suspect that you nurse a secret admiration for Lefkowitz's son?"

"You suspect! Go on, suspect. Lefkowitz's son means as much to me as my shoestring and no more."

"Then why do you waste your time selling tickets to his benefit?"

"Because, there are a lot of people like you I want to come to this benefit to Lefkowitz's son for one reason. And after he has gotten through with his insults you will understand why."