by Bellow, Saul
The neighborhood was largely Polish and Ukrainian, Swedish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Lutheran. The Jews were few and the streets tough. Bungalows and brick three-flats were the buildings. Back stairs and porches were made of crude gray lumber. The trees were cottonwood elms and ailanthus, the grass was crabgrass, the bushes lilacs, the flowers sunflowers and elephant-ears. The heat was corrosive, the cold like a guillotine as you waited for the streetcar. The family, Zet’s bullheaded father and two maiden aunts who were “practical nurses” with housebound patients (dying, usually), read Russian novels, Yiddish poetry, and were mad about culture. He was encouraged to be a little intellectual. So, in short pants, he was a junior Immanuel Kant. Musical (like Frederick the Great or the Esterhazys), witty (like Voltaire), a sentimental radical (like Rousseau), bereft of gods (like Nietzsche), devoted to the heart and to the law of love (like Tolstoy). He was earnest (the early shadow of his father’s grimness), but he was playful, too. Not only did he study Hume and Kant but he discovered Dada and Surrealism as his voice was changing. The mischievous project of covering the great monuments of Paris in mattress ticking appealed to him. He talked about the importance of the ridiculous, the paradox of playful sublimity. Dostoyevsky, he lectured me, had it right. The intellectual (petty bourgeois-plebeian) was a megalomaniac. Living in a kennel, his thoughts embraced the universe. Hence the funny agonies. And remember Nietzsche, the gai savoir._ And Heine and the “Aristophanes of Heaven.” He was a learned adolescent, was Zetland.
Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping gutta-percha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars. Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space. It was where trains arrived; where mail orders were dispatched. But on the lagoon, with turning boats, the water and the sky clear green, pure blue, the boring power of a great manufacturing center arrested (there was no smoke, the mills were crippled—industrial distress benefited the atmosphere), Zet recited “Upon the honeyed middle of the night…” Polack children threw rocks and crab apples from the shore.
Studying his French, German, math, and music. In his room a bust of Beethoven, a lithograph of Schubert (also with round specs) sitting at the piano, moving his friends’ hearts. The shades were drawn, the lamp burned. In the alley, peddlers’ horses wore straw hats to ward off sunstroke. Zet warded off the prairies, the real estate, the business and labor of Chicago. He boned away at his Kant. Just as assiduously, he read Breton and Tristan Tzara. He quoted, “The earth is blue, like an orange.” And he propounded questions of all sorts.
Had Lenin really expected democratic centralism to work within the Bolshevik party? Was Dewey’s argument in Human Nature and Conduct_ unassailable? Was the “significant form” position fruitful for painting? What was the future of primitivism in art?
Zetland wrote surrealist poems of his own: Plum lips suck the green of sleeping hills…_ or: Foaming rabbis rub electrical fish!_
The Zetland apartment was roomy, inconvenient, in the standard gloomy style of 1910. Built-in buffets and china closets, a wainscot in the dining room with Dutch platters, a gas log in the fireplace, and two stained-glass small windows above the mantelpiece. A windup Victrola played “Eli, Eli,” the Peer Gynt_ Suite. Chaliapin sang “The Flea” from Faust,_ Galli-Curci the “Bell Song” from _Lakmщ,__ and there were Russian soldiers’ choruses. Surly Max Zetland gave his family “everything,” he said. Old Zetland had been an immigrant. His start in life was slow. He learned the egg business in the poultry market on Fulton Street. But he rose to be assistant buyer in a large department store downtown: imported cheeses, Czech ham, British biscuits and jams—fancy goods. He was built like a fullback, with a black cleft in the chin and a long mouth. You would wear yourself out to win this mouth from its permanent expression of disapproval. He disapproved because he knew life._ His first wife, Elias’s mother, died in the flu epidemic of 1918. By his second wife old Zetland had a feebleminded daughter. The second Mrs. Zetland died of cancer of the brain. The third wife, a cousin of the second, was much younger. She came from New York; she had worked on Seventh Avenue; she had a past._ Because of this past_ Max Zetland gave way to jealousy and made nasty scenes, breaking dishes and shouting brutally. “Des histoiress, “_ said Zet, then practicing his French. Max Zetland was a muscular man who weighed two hundred pounds, but these were only scenes—not dangerous. As usual, the morning after, he stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved with his painstaking brass Gillette, made neat his reprehending face, flattened his hair like an American executive, with military brushes. Then, Russian style, he drank his tea through a sugar cube, glancing at the Tribune,_ and went off to his position in the Loop, more or less in Ordnung._ A normal day. Descending the back stairs, a short cut to the El, he looked through the window of the first floor at his Orthodox parents in the kitchen. Grandfather sprayed his bearded mouth with an atomizer—he had asthma. Grandmother made orange-peel candy. Peels dried all winter on the steam radiators. The candy was kept in shoeboxes and served with tea.
Sitting in the El, Max Zetland wet his finger on his tongue to turn the pages of the thick newspaper. The tracks looked down on small brick houses. The El ran like the bridge of the elect over the damnation of the slums. In those little bungalows Poles, Swedes, micks, spies, Greeks, and niggers lived out their foolish dramas of drunkenness, gambling, rape, bastardy, syphilis, and roaring death. Max Zetland didn’t even have to look; he could read about it in the Trib._ The little trains had yellow cane seats. Hand-operated gates of bent metal, waist-high, let you out of the car. Tin pagoda roofs covered the El platforms. Each riser of the long staircase advertised Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Iron loss made young girls pale. Max Zetland himself had a white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear, but acceptably pleasant, entering the merchandising palace on Wabash Avenue, neat in his office, smart on the telephone, fluent except for a slight Russian difficulty with initial aitches, releasing a mellow grumble when he spoke, his mind factual, tabular, prices and contracts memorized. He held in the smoke of his cigarettes as he stood by his desk. The smoke drifted narrowly from his nose. With a lowered face, he looked about. He judged with furious Jewish snobbery the laxity and brainlessness of the golf-playing goy who could afford to walk in knickers on the restricted fairway, who could be what he seemed, who had no buried fury, married no lascivious New York girls, had no idiot orphans, no house of death. Max Zetland’s hard paunch subdued by the cut of his jacket, the tense muscles of his calves showing through trouser legs, the smoke-retentive nose, the rage of taciturnity—well, in the business world one must be a nice fellow. He was an executive in a great retail organization and he was_ a nice fellow. He was a short-headed man whose skull had no great depth. But his face was broad, heavily masculine, self-consciously centered between the shoulders. His hair was parted in the middle and brushed flat. There was a wide space between his front teeth, which Zet inherited. Only the unshavable pucker in his father’s chin was a sign of pathos, and this hint of the pitiful Max Zetland was defied by the Russian military stoutness of his bearing, by his curt style of smoking, by the snap with which he drank a glass of schnapps. Among friends his son had various names for him. The General, the Commissar, Osipovich, Ozymandias, he often called him. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Before his third marriage, Ozymandias the widower would come home from the Loop with the Evening American,_ printed on peach-colored paper. He took a glass of whiskey before dinner and saw his daughter. Perhaps she was not feebleminded, only temporarily retarded. His bright son tried to tell him that Casanova was hydrocщphalie until he was eight and considered an imbecile, and that Einstein was a backward child. Max hoped she might be t
aught to sew. He started with table manners. Meals, for a time, were horrible. She was unreachable. In her the family face was compressed, reduced, condensed into a cat’s face. She stammered, she tottered, her legs were long and undeveloped. She picked up her skirt in company, she trickled on the toilet without closing the door. The kid gave away all the weaknesses of the breed. Relatives were sympathetic, but this sympathy of aunts and cousins Max sensed to be self-congratulatory. He coldly rejected it, looking straight before him and lengthening his straight mouth. When people spoke sympathetically to him about his daughter, he seemed to be considering the best way to put them to death.
Father Zetland read Russian and Yiddish poetry. He preferred the company of musical people and artists, bohemian garment workers, Tolstoyans, followers of Emma Goldman and of Isadora Duncan, revolutionists who wore pince-nez, Russian blouses, Lenin or Trotsky beards. He attended lectures, debates, concerts, and readings; the Utopians amused him; he respected brains and was sold on high culture. It was obtainable in Chicago, in those days.
Facing Humboldt Park, on California Avenue, the Chicago anarchists and Wobblies had their forum; the Scandinavians had their fraternal lodges, churches, a dance hall; the Galician Jews a synagogue; the Daughters of Zion their charity day nursery. On Division Street, after 1929, little savings banks crashed. One became a fish store. A tank for live carp was made of the bank marble. The vault became an icebox. A movie house turned into a funeral parlor. Nearby, the red carbarn rose from slummy weeds. The vegetarians had a grand photo of old Count Tolstoy in the window of the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant. What a beard, what eyes, and what a nose! Great men repudiated the triviality of ordinary and merely human things, including what was merely human in themselves. What was a nose? Cartilage. A beard? Cellulose. A count? A caste figure, a thing produced by epochs of oppression. Only Love, Nature, and God are good and great.
In one-hundred-percent-industrial contemporary Chicago, where shadows of loveliness were lacking, a flat wheel of land meeting a flat wheel of fresh water, intelligent boys like Zet, though fond of the world, too, were not long detained by surface phenomena. No one took Zet fishing. He did not go to the woods, was not taught to shoot, nor to clean a carburetor, nor even to play billiards or to dance. Zet concentrated on his books—his astronomy, geology, etc. First the blazing mass of matter, then the lifeless seas, then pulpy creatures crawling ashore, simple forms, more complex forms, and so on; then Greece, then Rome, then Arabian algebra, then history, poetry, philosophy, painting. Still wearing knickers, he was invited by neighborhood study groups to speak on the щlan vital, on the differences between Kant and Hegel. He was professorial, Germanic, the Wunderkind, Max Zetland’s secret weapon. Old Zet would be the man_ ol the family and young Zet its genius._
“He wanted me to be a John Stuart Mill,” said Zet. “Or some shrunken little Itzkowitz of a prodigy—Greek and calculus at the age of eight, damn him!” Zet believed he had been cheated of his childhood, robbed of the angelic birthright.
He believed all that old stuff about the sufferings of childhood, the lost paradise, the crucifixion of innocence. Why was he sickly, why was he myopic, why did he have a greenish color? Why, grim old Zet wanted him to be all marrow, no bone. He caged him in reprehending punitive silence, he demanded that he dazzle the world. And he never—but never—approved of anything.
To be an intellectual was the next stage of human development, the historical fate of mankind, if you prefer. Now the masses were reading, and we were off in all directions, Zet believed. The early phases of this expansion of mind could not fail to produce excesses, crime, madness. Wasn’t that, said Zet, the meaning of books like The Brothers Karamazov,_ the decay produced by rationalism in the feudal peasant Russian? And parricide the first result of revolution? The resistance to the modern condition and the modern theme? The terrible wrestling of Sin and Freedom? The megalomania of the pioneers? To be an intellectual was to be a parvenu. The business of these parvenus was to purge themselves of their first wild impulses and of their crazy baseness, to change themselves, to become disinterested. To love truth. To become great.
Naturally Zetland was sent to college. College was waiting for him. He won prizes in poetry, essay contests. He joined a literary society, and a Marxist study group. Agreeing with Trotsky that Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, he joined the Spartacus Youth League, but as a revolutionist he was fairly vague. He studied logic under Carnap, and later with Bertrand Russell and Morris R. Cohen.
The best of it was that he got away from home and lived in rooming houses, the filthier the better. The best was a whitewashed former coalbin on Woodlawn Avenue. Soft coal, still stored in the adjoining shed, trickled between the whitewashed planks. There was no window. On the cement floor was a rag rug, worried together out of tatters and coming unbound. An old oak library table with cigarette burns and a shadeless floorlamp were provided. The meters for the whole house were over Zet’s cot. Rent was $2.50 a week. The place was jolly—it was bohemian, it was European. Best of all, it was Russian! The landlord, Perchik, said that he had been game-beater for Grand Duke Cyril. Abandoned in Kamchatka when the Japanese War began, he trudged back across Siberia. With him Zet had Russian conversations. Long in the teeth, Perchik wore a meager beard, and the wires of his dime-store specs were twisted. In the back he had built a little house out of pop bottles, collected in a coaster in the alleys. Rags and garbage were burned in the furnace, and the fumes blew through the hot-air registers. The landlord sang old ballads and hymns, falsetto. Really, the place couldn’t have been better. Disorderly, dirty, irregular, free, and you could talk all night and sleep late. Just what you wanted for thought, for feeling, for invention. In his happiness, Zet entertained the Perchik house with his charades, speeches, jokes, and songs. He was a laundry mangle, a time clock, a tractor, a telescope. He did Don Giovanni_ in all parts and voices—_”Non sperar, se non m’uccidi… Donna folle, indarno gridi. “__ He reproduced the harpsichord background in the recitatives or the oboe weeping when the Commendatore’s soul left his body. To follow up he might do Stalin addressing a party congress, a Fuller Brush salesman in German, or a submarine commander sinking an amerikanische_ freighter. Zet also was practically useful. He helped people to move. He minded kids for married graduate students. He cooked for the sick. He looked after people’s dogs and cats when they went out of town, and shopped for old women in the house when it snowed. Now he was something between the stout boy and the nearsighted young man with odd ideas and exotic motives. Loving, virtually Franciscan, a simpleton for God’s sake, easy to cheat. An ingщnu. At the age of nineteen he had a great deal of Dickensian heart. When he earned a little money mopping floors at Billings Hospital, he shared it with clinic patients, bought them cigarettes and sandwiches, lent them carfare, walked them across the Midway. Sensitive to suffering and to symbols of suffering and misery, his eyes filled when he went into some Depression grocery. The withered potatoes, the sprouting onions, the unhappy face of the storekeeper got him. His cat had a miscarriage, and he wept about that, too, because the mother cat was grieving. I flushed the stillborn cats down the boardless grimy toilet in the cellar. He made me testy, carrying on like that. Practicing his feelings on everyone, I said. He warned me not to be hard-hearted. I said he exaggerated everything. He accused me of a lack of sensibility. It was an odd argument for two adolescents. I suppose the power of Americanization faltered during the Depression. We broke away, and seized the opportunity to be more foreign._ We were a laughable pair of university highbrows who couldn’t have a spat without citing William James and Karl Marx, or Villiers de l’lsle-Adam or Whitehead. We decided that we were the tender-minded and tough-minded of William James, respectively. But James had said that to know everything that happened in one city on a single day would crush the toughest mind. No one could be as tough as he needed to be. “You’ll be barren of sympathy if you don’t look out,” Zet said. That was the way he talked. His language was always elegant. Lord kn
ows where his patrician style came from—Lord Bacon, perhaps, plus Hume and a certain amount of Santayana. He debated with his friends in the whitewashed cellar. His language was very pure and musical.
But then he was musical. He didn’t walk down the street without practicing a Haydn quartet, or Borodin or Prokofiev. Overcoat buttoned at the neck, he hauled his briefcase and made the violin stops inside his fuzz-lined gloves and puffed the music in his throat and cheeks. In good heart, with skin the color of yellow grapes, he did the cello in his chest and the violins high in the nose. The trees were posted in the broom-swept, dust-mixed snow and were bound to the subpavement soil and enriched by sewer seepage. Zetland and the squirrels enjoyed the privileges of motility.