The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow

by Bellow, Saul

  But what could I do for Scholem? I couldn’t go running to his house and ring the bell after thirty years of estrangement. I couldn’t bring financial assistance—I don’t have the money to print so many thousands of pages. He would need a hundred thousand at least, and he might expect Ijah to conjure it out of the barren air of the Loop. Didn’t Ijah belong to a crack team of elite financial analysts? But Cousin Ijah was not one of the operators who had grabbed off any of the big money available for “intellectual” projects or enlightened reforms, the political grant-getters who have millions to play with.

  Also I shrank from sitting down with him in his six-flat parlor to discuss his life’s work. I didn’t have the language it required. My college biology would be of no use. My Spengler was deader than the Bohemian Cemetery where we discussed the great questions (dignified surroundings, massy tombs, decaying flowers).

  I didn’t have a language to share with Cousin Motty, either, to open my full mind to him; and from his side Cousin Scholem couldn’t enlist my support for his philosophical system until I had qualified myself by years of study. So little time was left that it was out of the question. In the circumstances, all I could do was to try to raise funds to have him buried in East Germany. The Communists, needing hard currency so badly, would not turn down a reasonable proposition. And toward morning, as I washed and shaved, I remembered that there was a cousin in Elgin, Illinois—not a close cousin, but one with whom I had always had friendly and even affectionate relations. He might be able to help. The affections have to manage as they can at a time so abnormal. They are kept alive in storage, as it were, for one doesn’t often see their objects. These mental hydro-ponic growths can, however, be curiously durable and tenacious. People seem able to keep one another on “hold” for decades or scores of years. Separations like these have a flavor of eternity. One interpretation of “having no contemporaries” is that all valuable associations are kept in a time-arrested state. Those who are absent seem to sense that they have not lost their value for you. The relationship is played ritardando_ on a trance instrument of which the rest of the orchestra is only subliminally aware.

  The person 1 refer to was still there, in Elgin. Mendy Eckstine, once a freelance journalist and advertising man, was now semiretired. He and Scholem Stavis were from altogether different spheres. Eckstine had been my pool-hall, boxing, jazz-club cousin. Mendy had had a peculiar relish for being an American of his time. Born in Muskingum, Ohio, where his father ran a gents’ furnishings shop, he attended a Chicago high school and grew up a lively, slangy man who specialized in baseball players, vaudeville performers, trumpeters and boogie-woogie musicians, gamblers, con artists, city hall small-rackets types. The rube shrewdie was a type he dearly loved—“Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick.” Mendy’s densely curled hair was combed straight up, his cheeks were high, damaged by acne, healed to a patchy whiteness. He had a wonderful start of the head, to declare that he was about to set the record straight. He used to make this movement when he laid down his cigarette on the edge of the pool table of the University of Wisconsin Rathskeller and picked up his cue to study his next shot. From Mendy as from Seckel 1 had learned songs. He loved hick jazz numbers like “Sounds a Little Goofus to Me,” and in particular, Oh, the cows went dry and the hens wouldn’t lay When he played on his ole cornet._

  Altogether an admirable person, and a complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art. The model on which he formed himself has been wiped out. In the late thirties he and I went to the fights together, or the Club de Lisa for jazz.

  Cousin Mendy was the man to approach on Scholem’s behalf because there was a fund, somewhere, set up by a relative dead these many years, the last of his branch. As I understood its provisions, this fund was set up to make essential family loans and also to pay for the education of poor relations, if they were gifted, perhaps even for their higher cultural activities. Vague about it myself, I was sure that Mendy would know, and I quickly got hold of him on the telephone. He said he would come downtown next day, delighted, he told me, to have a talk. “Been far too long, old buddy.”

  The fund was the legacy of an older Eckstine, Arcadius, called Artie. Artie, of whom nothing was expected and who had never in his life tied his shoelaces, not because he was too stout (he was only plump) but because he announced to the world that he was _dщgagщ,__ had come into some money toward the end of his life.

  Before the Revolution, he had brought to America a Russian schoolboy’s version of Pushkin’s life, and he gave Pushkin recitations incomprehensible to us. Modern experience had never touched him. Viewed from above, Artie’s round, brownish-fair head was the head of a boy, combed with boyish innocence. He grew somewhat puffy in the cheeks and eyelids. His eyes were kiwi green. He lost one of his fingers in a barbed-wire factory in 1917. Perhaps he sacrificed it to avoid the draft. There is a “cabinet portrait” of Artie and his widowed mother, taken about seventy years ago. He poses with his thumb under his lapel. His mother, Tanya, is stout, short, and Oriental. Although she looks composed, her face is in reality inflated with laughter. Why? Well, if her legs are so plump and short that they don’t reach the floor, the cause is a comical deficiency in the physical world, ludicrously incapable of adapting itself to Aunt Tanya. Tanya’s second marriage was to a millionaire junkman, prominent in his synagogue, a plain man and strictly Orthodox. Tanya, a movie fan, loved Clark Gable and never missed a performance of Gone with the Wind._ “Oy, Clark Gebble, I love him so!”

  Her old husband was the first to die. She followed in her mideighties, five years later. At the time of her death, Artie was a traveler in dehydrated applesauce and was demonstrating his product in a small downstate department store when the news came. He and his wife, a childless couple, retired at once. He said he would resume his study of philosophy, in which he had majored at Ann Arbor God knows how many years ago, but the management of his property and money kept him from the books. He used to say to me, “Ijah, wot is your opinion of Chon Dewey—ha?”

  When these Eckstine cousins died, it was learned that a fund for higher studies had been set up under the will—a sort of foundation, said Mendy.

  “And has it been used?”

  “Very little.”

  “Could we get money out of it for Scholem Stavis?”

  He said, “That depends,” implying that he might be able to swing it.

  I had prepared an exhibit for him. He quickly grasped the essentials of Scholem’s case. “There wouldn’t be money enough to publish his life’s work. And how do we find out whether he really is to Darwin what Newton was to Copernicus?”

  “It would be hard for us to decide.”

  “Who would you ask?” said Mendy “We’d have to retain a few specialists. My confidence in academics is not too great.”

  You think they’d steal from a defenseless genius-amateur?” Contact with inspiration often disturbs your steady worker….”

  “Assuming that Scholem is inspired. Artie and his missis didn’t live long enough to enjoy their inheritance. I wouldn’t like to blow too much of their dough on a brainstorm,” said Mendy. “I’d have more confidence in Scholem if he weren’t so statuesque.”

  People nowadays don’t trust you if you don’t show them your trivial humanity—Leopold Bloom in the outhouse, his rising stink, his wife’s goat udders, or whatever. The chosen standards for common humanity have moved toward this lower range of facts.

  “Besides,” said Mendy, “what’s all this Christianity? Why does he have to quote from the most anti-Semitic of the Gospels? After what we’ve been through, that’s not the direction to take.”

  “For all I know, he may be the heir of Immanuel Kant and can’t accept an all-Jewish outlook. He’s also an American claiming his natural right to an important position in the history of knowledge.”

  “Even so,” said Mendy, “what’s this asking to be buried behind the iron curtain? Doesn’t he know what Jew-haters those Russians are—right up there wi
th the Germans? Does he think by lying there that he’ll soak up all that hate like blotting paper? Cure them? Maybe he thinks he can—he and nobody else.”

  He was working himself up to accuse Scholem of megalomania. These psychological terms lying around, tempting us to use them, are a menace. They should all be shoveled into trucks and taken to the dump.

  It was interesting to consider Mendy’s own development. He was very intelligent, though you might not think so if you had observed how he had dramatized himself as a middle American of the Hoover or early Roosevelt period. He pursued the idiocies and even the pains of his Protestant models, misfortunes like the estrangement of husbands and wives, sexual self-punishment. He would get drunk in the Loop and arrive swacked on the commuter train, like other Americans. He bought an English bulldog that irritated his wife to madness. He and his motherin-law elaborated all the comical American eccentricities of mutual dislike. She went down to the cellar when he was at home and after he had gone to bed she came up to make herself a cup of cocoa in the kitchen. He would say to me, “I sent her to a nutritionist because I couldn’t understand how she could look so well and rosy on a diet of sweet rolls and cocoa.” (Histrionics, I guess, had kept her in splendid condition.) Mendy made an ally of his young son; they went on fishing trips and visited Civil War battlegrounds. He was a man-and-boy Midwesterner, living out of a W C. Fields script. And yet in the eyes under that snap-brim fedora there had always been a mixture of Jewish lights, and in his sixties he was visibly more Jewish. And, as I have said, the American model he had adopted was now utterly obsolete. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were infinitely more modern than the Punkin Crick smart alecks. Mendy was not returning to the religion of his fathers, far from it, but in semiretirement, stuck out there in Elgin, he must have been as hard up for comprehension as Cousin Motty had been in the locker room of his club.

  Accordingly, it didn’t surprise him that I should take so much interest in cousins. His own interest was stirred. Unless I misinterpreted the expression of his now malformed, lumpy, warm face, he was appealing to me to extend this interest to him. He wished to draw nearer.

  “You aren’t being sentimental, are you, Ijah, because you and Scholem went on such wonderful walks together? You’d probably be able to judge if you read his blockbusting book. They didn’t hire dummies at the Rand Corporation—someday I’ll ask you to tell me about that super think tank.”

  “I’d rather call it sympathy, not soft sentiment.”

  In the moral sphere, a wild ignorance, utter anarchy.

  Mendy said, “If you tried talking to him, he’d lecture you from on high, wouldn’t he? Since you don’t understand about these zygotes and gametes, you’d be forced to sit and listen….”

  What Mendy intended to say was that he and I—_we__ could understand each other, owing to our common ilk. Jews who had grown up on the sidewalks of America, we were in no sense foreigners, and we had brought so much enthusiasm, verve, love to this American life that we had become it._ Odd that it_ should begin to roll toward oblivion just as we were perfecting ourselves in this admirable democracy. However, our democracy was passщ. The new_ democracy with its new_ abstractions was cruelly disheartening. Being an American always had been something of an abstract project. You came as an immigrant. You were offered a most reasonable proposition and you said yes to it. You were found._ With the new abstractions you were lost._ They demanded a shocking abandonment of personal judgment. Take Eunice’s letter to the medical school as an example. By using the word “integrity” you could cheat with a good conscience. Schooled in the new abstractions, you no longer had to worry about truth and falsehood, good and evil. What excused you from good and evil was the effort you put into schooling. You worked hard at your limited lesson, you learned it, and you were forever in the clear. You could say, for instance, “Guilt has to die. Human beings are entitled to guiltless pleasure.” Having learned this valuable lesson, you could now accept the fucking of your daughters, which in the past would have choked you. You were compensated by the gratification of a lesson well learned. Well, there’s the new thoughtfulness for you. And it’s possibly on our capacity for thoughtfulness that our survival depends—all the rational decisions that have to be made. And listen here, I am not digressing at all. Cousin Scholem was a noble creature who lived in the forests of old_ thoughtfulness. An excellent kind of creature, if indeed he was the real thing. Cousin Mendy suggested that he was not. Cousin Mendy wished to remind me that he and I were representatives of a peculiar Jewish and American development (wiped out by history) and had infinitely more in common than any superannuated prodigy could ever understand.

  “I want to do something for Scholem, Mendy.”

  “I’m not sure we can spend Cousin Artie’s money to bury him in East Germany.”

  “Fair enough. Now, suppose you raise the money to have his great work read… find a biologist to vet it. And a philosopher and a historian.”

  “Maybe so. I’ll take it up with the executors. I’ll get back to you,” said Mendy.

  I divined from this that he himself was all of the executors.

  “I have to go abroad,” I said. “I may even see Scholem in Paris. His valedictory letter mentions a trip to plan the taxis-of-the-Marne business.”

  I gave Mendy Miss Rodinson’s number.

  “Flying the Concorde, I suppose,” said Mendy. Devoid of envy. I would have been glad of his company.

  I stopped in Washington to confer with International Monetary Fund people about the intended resumption of loans from commercial banks to the Brazilians. I found time to spend a few hours at the Library of Congress, looking for Bogoras and Jochelson material, and to get inquiries under way at the East German chancery. Then I telephoned my former wife at National Public Radio. Isabel has become one of its most familiar voices. After three marriages, she has resumed her maiden name. I sometimes hear it after the prancing music of the program’s signature: “We will now hear from our correspondent Isabel Greenspan in Washington.” I invited her to have dinner with me. She said no, offended perhaps that I hadn’t called earlier from Chicago. She said she would come to the Hay-Adams Hotel to have a drink with me.

  The thought persistently suggested by Isabel when we meet is that man is the not-yet-stabilized animal. By this I mean not only that defective, diseased, abortive types are common (Isabel is neither defective nor sick, by the way) but that the majority of human beings will never attain equilibrium and that they are by nature captious, fretful, irritable, uncomfortable, looking for relief from their travail and angry that it does not come. A woman like Isabel, determined to make an impression of perfect balance, reflects this unhappy instability. She identifies me with errors she has freed herself from; she measures her progress by our ever-more-apparent divergence. Clever enough to be a member of the Mensa (high-IQ) society, and, on the air, a charming person, she is always somewhat somber with me, as if she weren’t altogether satisfied with her “insights.” As a national figure in a program offering enlightened interpretation to millions of listeners, Sable is “committed,”

  “engaged”; but as an intelligent woman, she is secretly rueful about this enlightenment.

  She talked to me about Chicago, with which, in certain respects, she identified me. “White machine aldermen tying the black mayor in knots while they strip the city of its last buck. While you, of course, see it all. You always see it all. But you’d rather go on mooning.” There was a noteworthy difference in Sable this afternoon. At cocktail time, she was made up like the dawn of day. Her dark color was the departing night. She was more perfumed than the dawn. It was otherwise a very good resemblance. No denying that she is an attractive woman. She was dressed in dark, tea-colored silk with a formal design in scarlet. She didn’t always make herself so attractive for our meetings.

  Vain to pretend that I “see it all,” but what she meant when she said “mooning” was quite clear. It had two distinct and associated meanings: (1) my special preocc
upations, and (2) my lifelong dream-connection with Virgie Dunton nщe Miletas, the eight-fingered concert harpist. Despite her congenital defect, Virgie had mastered the entire harp repertoire, omitting a few impossible works, and had a successful career. It’s perfectly true that I had never been cured of my feeling for Virgie—her black eyes, her round face, its whiteness, its frontal tendency, its feminine emanations, the assurances of humanity or pledges of kindness which came from it. Even the slight mutilation of her short nose—it was the result of a car accident; she refused plastic surgery—was an attraction. It’s perfectly true that for me the word “female” had its most significant representation in her. Whenever possible, I attended her concerts; I walked in her neighborhood in hopes of running into her, imagined that I saw her in department stores. Chance meetings—five in thirty years—were remembered in minute actuality. When her husband, a heavy drinker, lent me Galbraith’s book on his accomplishments in India, I read every word of it, and this can only be explained by the swollen affect or cathexis that had developed. Virgie Miletas, the Venus of rudimentary thumbs, with her electric binding power, was the real object of Sable’s “you’d rather go on mooning.” The perfect happiness I might have known with Mrs. Miletas-Dunton, like the longed-for union of sundered beings in the love myth of Aristophanes—I refrain from invoking the higher Eros described by Socrates during the long runs of the blatting El trains that used to carry me, the inspired philosophy student, from Van Buren Street and its hockshops to Sixty-third Street and its throng of junkies—was an artificial love dream and Sable was quite right to despise it.