Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer. Bernard Wolfe

they must have felt a warm glow from top to bottom, an impulse to embrace the Professor and kiss him all over. After all, a theory that traced this economic avalanche to extra-terrestrial sources, sunspots or Halley’s Comet or the furthermost red stars or whatever, automatically absolved the Hoover Administration of all responsibility for the collapse, as well as the free-enterprise system it was constantly embracing and kissing. But they were just enough in touch with the pulse of the public to know that, however much they themselves cottoned to Fisher’s proposal to make economics a branch of astronomy, the American people wouldn’t buy it.

      I’m not saying that overnight the nation had turned Marxist in its approach to economics, nothing like that. But with the pinch of very hard times, with all the belt-tightening, the scramble to eat, rudiments of a materialist interpretation of history had been planted in many heads, enough at least to make them look to the workings of the profit system for the culprit rather than to the sun’s sporadic discolorations.

      Prof. Fisher, finding himself accorded the treatment a prophet usually gets in his own country, with all the other countries following suit, retired from his role as economist, in fact, retired from public life and teaching altogether. And he donated all the papers from his busy life to the Yale Library, thereby making work for me.

      I was impressed by the reverse logic here. It was the Depression that finally divorced Prof. Fisher, the excommunicator of depression, from his function in the world, in short, eliminated his job, excommunicated him. It was the Depression that had eliminated all sorts of jobs for all sorts of people, including me. But it was in response to the Depression that the Professor gave all his papers to the Library, creating, finally, a job for me. Unless you’re a dialectician you’re just not going to understand much of what goes on in this dizzy, dippy, turnabout world.

      This was early 1940. If you want to know what it was really like in those days let me sum it up by saying that I was making $12, a week and banking $3 out of it, and I wanted for nothing—nothing I wanted, outside of a job, a real one.