The Toilet-Paper Papers
Mayer, Milton
The Toilet-Paper Papers MILTON MAYER Paris I have never, until now, used the word "shit" in print —nor, come to think of it, in what we used to call (when we could still tell the difference)...
...It costs too much to bleach the pulp...
...I should be betraying the example of our Leader and be less than candid if, however, I did not report that the French brand asserts itself to be plus risistant and plus doux...
...Seventy cents in pink or blue—never white...
...We had only just cleared Southern California when the panic struck in—where else?—Southern California...
...The word "shit"—"bullshit" among the innovative, creative, mind-expanded young—is now the commonest word of the common gender we have become...
...I should say that the expensive French was less, rather than more resistant than the cheaper, and that therein lay its expensiveness, since M. Larousse informs me that resistant means "contumacious...
...Paper of every kind is in short supply and always has been, because the Europeans know (or always knew, before we invaded them) that the resources of the land are not infinite...
...The brand name is Old Impermeable or, alternatively, Slippery Ellum...
...Nothing else is treated any more with the same sly smirk unaltered since Chic Sale's sneaky little classic of a half century ago...
...At home we "go to the toilet" —a term so uneasy that it is no longer used in its proper meaning of gussying up, viz., making one's toilet...
...last inhibition, and it shows no sign of abatement in the wake of the abatement of every other...
...It belongs to the generic category of waste, to be disposed of under cover of darkness...
...The only dirty word left in the vernacular is "wipe...
...Defecation is the secret vice of the Western world...
...To the guillotine...
...It is precious beyond the dreams of profligacy...
...In London after the Great War II, I used the water closet (European for "facilities") in the legislative halls of what was still the greatest empire in history...
...It is a crude expletive, used (almost always metaphorically) by persons (in my day, male persons) of impoverished vocabulary...
...The commercials show the fellow suffering from "gasidity," and what do they show him doing?—Belching...
...But Occidental man will not have it so...
...Television — "Occasional irregularity...
...So, too, the crouching man in the process of elimination was helpless against attack in the open (as was, and is, the cuckolding fornicator...
...Spread it on thick...
...Baby Mayer and I were splitting the scene aboard a French freighter in the Pacific...
...The toilet-paper panic caught me with my pants up...
...The hot films go so far as to show a male urinating, but not a woman...
...We bourgeois speak freely of our infidelities, our perfidies, and our unbelief, but not about our money...
...Eastward toward Eden the quality gives way (the quantity, too) to Old Corrugate (also marketed as Old Scratch...
...Let him but catch you eying a living stick on your own woodlot, and you're in trouble...
...I have got to write about shit, or, rather, shitting, and the aspiring artist aspires to precision at the expense of both elegance and decorum (as, in this case, does the editor of The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language...
...To the Tower...
...The handshake disarmed the two suspicious, and suspect, parties to it...
...Old Corrugate is an unpolished crepe that defies the man who tore the Manhattan telephone book in two...
...It reaches its apogee, oddly enough, in the Socialist countries— oddly enough because it is in the Socialist countries that the Socialist ideal of production for use is proclaimed, and Old Corrugate is obviously produced for the prevention of use...
...the defecatory posture is proscribed...
...Doux may mean "soft" or, according to M. Larousse, "Your horse goes very easy," votre cheval va fort doux...
...The sidewalk urinals of Paris are gone, and there is every indication that Europe as a whole—or, at least, the European gentry—is throwing the ready around as if it was going to be proclaimed illegal (and not just worthless) tomorrow...
...And until the forest' is gone, it is cheap...
...I do not suppose, however, that I shall have occasion to use the precise term soon again...
...It's the last one you'll see...
...In the pleasant months to come, and they had better come soon, I shall keep an intrepid watch on the world toilet-paper front while my betters follow the world crisis in every kind of oil except castor...
...There is no hard evidence that George Washington, Queen Mary, or Whistler's mother ever excreted anything but goodness, truth, and beauty, and the gung-ho heroes and heroines of modern fiction, though they retire on stage to blow-by-blow dalliance, never retire to the ritirato...
...He has his privy, i.e., his privacy...
...Neither his condition nor his vocabulary affords him circumlocution...
...Explicit fornication is everywhere exhibited, explicit excretion nowhere...
...There never has been...
...The Toilet-Paper Papers MILTON MAYER Paris I have never, until now, used the word "shit" in print —nor, come to think of it, in what we used to call (when we could still tell the difference) mixed company...
...How much the bourgeois has is never to be asked (much less answered) socially...
...for the one-holer originated, like the handshake, with the raw relationship of strangers...
...The American paper bag at the supermarket, take two, take ten, is another European unknown...
...At home we speak of bowel movements, abroad never...
...Cut it in half...
...For the American bourgeois the holy of holies is defecation...
...Your primitive is a man without plumbing—a countryman, or shitkicker...
...Down the cupboard...
...But the forester is a dreadful personage...
...But I am driven from my Pecksniffian perch by the toilet-paper panic...
...Have another...
...There's more where that came from...
...unflushable on the first, and sometimes on the second or third, go-around...
...The heritage survives the necessity...
...But shit is untouchable with a pitchfork...
...The scatological joke still depends on the scatology and not on the joke...
...you have only to sit, as I did recently at a boys' school, in atavistic awkwardness in a doorless stall contrived to discourage adolescent masturbation...
...Each sheet of the Old Impermeable was stamped, "Property of the Houses of Parliament," to discourage the loyal, if dejected, Briton from ripping it off...
...What I am, then, is an elitist...
...Save it up...
...He has, in addition, particular tribal sancta...
...In Europe the king is nothing, and what the British call "the government of the day" comes and goes...
...Manure, of course— and how wholesomely acrid the scent of the newly spread field...
...Everybody who is anybody in Southern California has tinted and perfumed—even flowered—"tissue" to match the plumbing...
...advertises cleaners for "the bowl"—which bowl, Pop?—but the bowl is never displayed...
...But candor is not confined to the Maison Blanche in Washington...
...In America the poor man's tissue isn't tinted or perfumed or flowered, but only whiter than white...
...Up the hatch...
...So slice it thin...
...What I really am is a mealy-mouthed American bourgeois prude...
...It is the Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, is currently teaching at the University of Paris...
...So stuffed is his sack with sanctimony that he will starve rather than avail himself of the bounty of his own excrementa and recycle the one organic fertilizer accessible in adequate quantity...
...The doctor talks intimately about "flatulence," the old GP about "passing gas," though it would, like the rose, smell no differently by its right name...
...There isn't a sheet of white toilet paper in all of Europe...
...Twenty years ago it didn't exist in any form...
...Clog the pipes...
...Unlike the weather, everybody does something about it, but nobody talks about it...
...So use it up...
...The suspicion abides that both Lafayette and Kilroy should of stood in bed...
...Money, of course, is the tutelary deity of the bourgeois everywhere, as unmentionable as the ancient Hebrew name of Yahweh...
...This preciosity is the hallmark— is there any other?—of civilization...
...Aboard the European freighter, and in the European home, the toilet-paper (called "toilet-paper") is tawny of hue, glassy of surface, and (mirabile dictu...
...It lasts a long time, because there is so little point in using it at all...
...Bernard—a'leve shalom—tells us that man is a sack of dung...
...Away from home, of course, it's the washroom, the restroom, the men's room, the powder room (at the boldest, the John, which is the nearest we can come to not saying it at all...
...I have just returned from a close survey of the Paris mini-supermarts which produced, for investigative purposes, a package of the most expensive papier-toilette in Europe...
...Softer than soft, it represents the life style of the American lumpenbourgeoisie and the death of the American forest...
...Alongside it I have placed, for investigative purposes, the wrapper of the last comparable role of Scottissue (at twenty cents) that I'll hug to my leathery old heart for a long time to come...
...There is something sanctified in every culture...
...Now you get it in the towns, but only as an American take-off: anything heavier than a cream puff splits it open...
...This euphemy, or euphemysticism, extends to every adjunct of the act...
...Nor, come to think of it further, in unmixed company...
...It comes in small rolls, or flat packs, at forty to fifty cents for the comparable quantity of American whiter-than-white, softer-thansoft...
...St...
...even the most expensive French product makes no claim (as Scottissue does) to being absorbant...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
