Everybody Knows Joe
"Everybody Knows Joe" by C. M. Kornbluth is a psychological character sketch narrated by an unnamed inner voice that shares a body and a life with a man named Joe. The narrator opens with a blunt thesis: at least two people live inside every person, and in this case one of them is Joe himself, vain, self-satisfied, and hopelessly weak-willed, while the other is this exasperated, clear-eyed companion-conscience who sees through every excuse Joe makes and is dragged along for the ride regardless. The story follows a single representative Thursday in Joe's life as a New York freelance writer, used to illustrate the pattern the narrator has evidently endured many times before. Joe wakes in a hotel room, showers, and would skip shaving entirely if not prodded, then wastes a long minute admiring himself in the mirror as though vanity were his own idea rather than a habit imposed on him. At breakfast he orders a heavy, indulgent meal, tomato juice, eggs, sausage, a sugared doughnut, and coffee with cream and sugar, justifying it as fuel for a hard day of work even though his day will involve nothing more strenuous than sitting in a library. The narrator is too disgusted to argue, noting that Joe is helpless once he catches the smell of a diner. Joe then wants to taxi eight blocks to the New York Public Library, an extravagance the narrator shames him out of by pointing out he is charging six hundred dollars for the week's freelance work, a jab Joe deflects rather than confront directly. At the library he inflates his own credentials on the research request slip, listing a prestigious-sounding firm affiliation he does not actually have, since he is unattached and has not even secured a firm assignment from the publisher, Griffin Press. He describes his task grandly on the form as preparing a biochemistry article for Griffin's encyclopedia yearbook. He also cannot resist lecturing the patient librarian on how the library should be organized and run. Despite his pomposity, Joe is tolerable, even sympathetic, once he actually settles into work, and the narrator concedes this is one of the few things that keeps their relationship from becoming outright violent. Joe spends the day productively, transcribing roughly a hundred research entries after a lunch break, then leaves the library swollen with self-satisfaction, comparing himself to Herman Melville having just finished a masterpiece. The narrator deflates him, reminding him the article itself, the actual writing, still has to be produced and sold, but Joe waves this off as mere mechanical journalism beneath his talents, a boast the narrator attributes to Joe's brief wartime stint running copy for the Associated Press having gone to his head. Joe then indulges in grandiose comparisons between himself and religious prophets who didn't find their calling until their late twenties or thirties, using this as an excuse to justify not writing the article that night either. Instead, Joe calls Maggie, a graduate student pursuing a sociology doctorate at NYU who also does city case work, and who lives in a modest bohemian Greenwich Village apartment. She is, as usual, immediately available and invites him over for a quiet evening with records, and he accepts, citing exhaustion from his supposedly grueling day. The narrator openly condemns Joe's treatment of her, telling him he is exploiting a woman who wants marriage and knows Joe will never provide it, urging him to release her so she can find someone serious. Joe brushes this off with well-worn rationalizations. At Maggie's apartment, Joe drinks wine and seltzer while pompously belittling sociology as an imprecise, unscientific field compared to his own biochemistry research, reducing Maggie to an apologetic position before graciously "forgiving" her. He even hints, half-drunkenly, that he might be ready to settle down, not this year but perhaps next, framing thirty as a natural point to reassess one's life, a speech calculated to keep Maggie hopeful and available without committing him to anything. The story's turning point comes when Maggie plays a new recording of Brahms's Serenade No. 1 and asks for his opinion. Joe, having glimpsed the album's liner notes, delivers an elaborately knowledgeable critique invoking counterpoint, Brahms's debts to Haydn and Beethoven, and specific movements, all performed erudition rather than genuine listening. Maggie then reveals she bought the record cheaply because it is a mispressing: side two is not the promised continuation of the Serenade but an entirely different work, Schumann's Symphonic Studies, exposing that Joe never actually listened at all and simply generated confident-sounding nonsense. Caught in his fraud, Joe reacts with wounded, self-righteous indignation, accusing Maggie of betraying his trust, and storms out. The narrator closes with weary resignation, doubting Joe will ever learn from these repeated humiliations, and acknowledging bitterly that he, forced to inhabit Joe's life and mistakes alongside him, ought to know that better than anyone.
By C.M. Kornbluth · First published 1953 · Genre: Psychological Fiction, Satire, Literary Fiction