by Saul Bellow
But then, I may be expecting too much from Myron. He has the pride of what he has become: a successful young man, comfortable, respected, safe for the present from those craters of the spirit which I have lately looked into. Worst of all, Myron has learned, like so many others, to prize convenience. He has learned to be accommodating. That is not a private vice; it has ramified consequences—terrible ones.
For months I have been angry with my friends. I have thought of them as “failing” me. Since the Servatius party, last March, I have been brooding over this failure. I have made it look like a major catastrophe, whereas it was nothing of the sort, and have made an obsessional grievance of betrayal where, in fact, only my shortsightedness was at fault—that and the inflationary, grandiose, tasteless attitudes I dissociate myself from by pinning them on Joseph. In reality, the Servatius party merely forced on my attention certain defects in the people around me which, if I had been as astute as I should have been, I would have recognized long before, and of which I think I must have been partly aware all the time.
Partly, I say. And here I feel it necessary to revive Joseph, that creature of plans. He had asked himself a question I still would like answered, namely, “How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” Hence the plans. Unfortunately, most of them were foolish. Also, they led him to be untrue to himself. He made mistakes of the sort people make who see things as they wish to see them or, for the sake of their plans, must see them. There might be some justice in the view that man was born the slayer of his father and of his brother, full of instinctive bloody rages, licentious and unruly from his earliest days, an animal who had to be tamed. But, he protested, he could find in himself no such history of hate overcome. He could not. He believed in his own mildness, believed in it piously. He allowed this belief to interfere with his natural shrewdness and did both himself and his friends a disservice. They could not give him what he wanted.
What he wanted was a “colony of the spirit,” or a group whose covenants forbade spite, bloodiness, and cruelty. To hack, to tear, to murder was for those in whom the sense of the temporariness of life had shrunk. The world was crude and it was dangerous and, if no measures were taken, existence could indeed become—in Hobbes’ phrase, which had long ago lodged in Joseph’s mind—“nasty, brutish, short.” It need not become so if a number of others would combine to defend themselves against danger and crudity.
He thought he had found those others, but even before the Servatius party he (or rather I) had begun to have misgivings about the progress that was being made. I was beginning to see that a difficult plan or program like mine had to take into account all that was natural, including corruptness. I had to be faithful to the facts, and corruptness was one of them.
But the party shocked me.
I did not want to go. It was Iva who insisted, out of loyalty to Minna Servatius and because she knew what it was to be a disappointed hostess. It was a long time since a party, any party, had given me pleasure. I liked nothing better than to see my friends singly or in pairs, but when they came together in a large group they disheartened me. You knew what to expect beforehand. If there were jokes, you knew how they would be told; if there were exhibitions, you knew who would make them and who would be hurt or shamed or gratified by them. You knew what Stillman would do, you knew what George Hayza would do, you knew that Abt would make fun of everyone and that Minna would have difficulties with her husband. You knew there was bound to be mischief, distortion, and strain, and yet you went. And why? Because Minna had prepared a party; because your friends were going to be there. And they were coming because you were going to be there, and on no account must anyone be let down.
When the heat and stridency of the party burst upon us through the open door, I began to regret that I had not been more firm in refusing, this once. Minna met us in the entry hall. She was wearing a black dress with a high, silver-trimmed collar; her legs were bare, and she had on high-heeled, red sandals. It was not immediately apparent how drunk she was. She appeared, at first, self-possessed and grave; her face was white, her forehead full of creases. Then we noticed how she was perspiring and how unsteady her eyes were. She looked first at Iva and then at me, saying nothing. We did not know what to expect. Then, with alarming suddenness, she cried, “Sound the gong; they’re here.”
“Who?” said Jack Brill, putting his head out of the door.
“Joseph and Iva. Always last to show up. They come when everybody’s high so they can stand around and watch us make fools of ourselves.”
“It’s my fault,” Iva murmured. We were both taken aback by Minna’s outcry. “I have such a cold, and …”
“Darling,” said Minna. “I was only joking. Come in.”
She led us into the living room. There, both doors of the phonograph were open, but the guests talked; no one seemed to listen to the music. And here was the scene, predictable to the last detail, hours, days, weeks before—the light furniture in the popular Swedish style, the brown carpet, the Chagall and Gris prints, the vines trailing from the mantelpiece, the bowl of Cohasset punch. Minna had invited a number of “strangers—” acquaintances, that is, who did not belong to the inner circle. There was a young woman to whom I had once been introduced. I remembered her because of her downy, slightly protuberant lip. She was quite pretty, however. Her name escaped me. Did she work in Minna’s office? Was she married to the fat man in the steel-rimmed glasses? Had I also met him? I would never know. And in this noise I could not help being indifferent about it. So it was with these strangers. Some, like Jack Brill, you came to know well, in time. The others remained grouped together indistinctly and were recalled, if the need arose, as “that fellow with the glasses” or “that pasty-looking couple.”
One by one, the friends came forward—Abt, George Hayza, Myron, Robbie Stillman. They were the center of the party; they performed. The others looked on, and who could tell whether they were amused or resentful at their exclusion, or even if they were aware of being excluded? The party went on around them. If they were aware of what was happening, they made the best of it.
And so did you. Your first tour of the room done, you moved aside with a glass and a cigarette. You sat—if you could find a place—and watched the performers and the dancers. You heard Robbie Stillman tell a story he had told any number of times about the mishaps of a stuttering girl, or about a hobo with a new portable radio he had met one day on the steps of the Aquarium. You did not like him less for telling it. You felt, somehow, that he, too, was forced to endure it, that he began unwillingly and was under a compulsion to finish what no one wanted to hear finished. You could not blame him.
Minna went around the living room from group to group, unsteadily, as if in danger of falling from her high heels.
Finally she stopped before George Hayza. We heard them arguing. It turned out that she wanted him to record on the machine a poem he had made popular years ago when he had played at being a surrealist To his credit, he refused. That is, he tried to refuse, reddening and smiling anxiously. He wanted to live it down. Everybody was tired of it, he most of all. Others came to his support. Abt said, with an edge of impatience in his voice, that George ought to be allowed to judge whether or not he should recite it. And since everyone had heard it—a dozen times …
“Everyone has not heard it,” said Minna. “Besides, I want to make a record of it. It’s clever.”
“It used to be considered clever.”
“It still is. It’s very clever.”
Abt gave up the argument, for a sense of a special situation was arising. Abt had once been engaged to Minna, but for reasons none of us knew, she had suddenly decided to marry Harry Servatius. There was, therefore, a complex history of injured feelings between Abt and Minna, and, in a gathering atmosphere of embarrassment, Abt withdrew, and Minna had her way. The poem was recorded. George’s voice came out strangely high and unsteady.
“I am alone
And eat my hair as a calendar of regrets—�
�
George, with a grimace of apology, backed away from the phonograph. Only Minna was satisfied; she played the record again.
“What’s wrong tonight?” I asked Myron.
“Oh—it’s Harry, I guess. He’s in the study with Gilda Hillman. They’ve been there all evening. Talking.”
“Joseph,” said Iva from her chair near by, “will you get me some more?” She held out her glass.
“Iva,” said Jack Brill, with a warning laugh. “Go slow.”
“With what? The punch?”
“It tastes mild, but it isn’t mild at all.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink any more of it,” I said, “since you’re not feeling well.”
“I don’t know why I’m so thirsty. I haven’t eaten anything salty.”
“I’ll bring you some water if you like.”
“Water.” She drew back the glass contemptuously.
“I wish you wouldn’t drink tonight. It’s a strong punch,” I said. My tone was unmistakable. I did not mean to be disobeyed. Yet a little later I saw her at the bowl and frowned at the quick motion with which she raised her arm and drank. I was irritated enough to consider, for a moment, striding up and snatching the glass away.
Instead I started a conversation with Abt on the first subject that came to hand, the war in Libya. We wandered into the kitchen, talking.
Abt is one of my oldest and best friends. I have always been much attached to him and have valued him perhaps more than he has valued me. That does not make much difference; he certainly has great affection for me, and some respect. At college we roomed together for a while. We were temporarily estranged because of a political matter. When we returned to Chicago we resumed our friendship, and while he worked for his doctorate—until last June he was an instructor in political science—he practically lived with us.
“We owe a lot to the Italians,” Abt was saying. “They have a sensible attitude toward the war. They want to go home. And that isn’t our only indebtedness. Capitalism never made them the victims of addition and subtraction. They remained a thoughtful people.” (He spoke slowly, so that I knew he was improvising, an old habit of his.) “And they never became swashbucklers. They have better taste and less false pride than the heirs of Arminius. Of course, that was an Italian mistake. Tacitus inflated the Germans. …”
My Irritation with Iva faded. I found myself listening, amused, to his praise of the Italians. “So that’s our debt,” I said, smiling. “Do you think they’re going to save us?”
“They won’t do us any harm. It begins to look as though civilization may start its comeback from the Mediterranean, where it was born.”
“Have you tried that on Dr. Rood?”
“He’d take me seriously and try to steal the idea.”
Dr. Arnold Rood, or Mary Baker Rood, as Abt liked to call him, was the head of his department and a dean of the college.
“How is the old man?”
“Still oily, still the highest-paid Reader in the city, and just as ignorant as ever. I have become his favorite problem in conversion and I have to see him twice a week to discuss Science and Health. Some fine afternoon I’ll stick a knife into him and say, ‘Pray yourself out of that, you bastard.’ That’s a vulgar refutation, like Johnson’s kicking the stone to triumph over Berkeley. But I can’t think of any other way to deal with him.”
I laughed, and at the same moment another, shriller laugh, almost an outcry, came from the front of the house. I stared down the hall.
“Minna,” Abt said.
“I wish something could be done. …” It appalled me to hear that cry and to recall the look on her face when she had greeted us in the entry hall. The party blared on inside, and I began to think what a gathering of this sort meant. And it came to me all at once that the human purpose of these occasions had always been to free the charge of feeling in the pent heart; and that, as animals instinctively sought salt or lime, we, too, flew together at this need as we had at Eleusis, with rites and dances, and at other high festivals and corroborees to witness pains and tortures, to give our scorn, hatred, and desire temporary liberty and play. Only we did these things without grace or mystery, lacking the forms for them and, relying on drunkenness, assassinated the Gods in one another and shrieked in vengefulness and hurt. I frowned at this dreadful picture.
“Oh, yes,” said Abt, “she’s having a bad time.”
It reassured me to hear him say this; he felt as I did about it.
“But she shouldn’t allow herself. …” Rapid footsteps came toward the kitchen. “There’s such a thing as. …” But again he did not finish. Minna came in accompanied by George.
“What’s such a thing?” Minna said.
“Was that you yelling?” said Abt.
“I wasn’t yelling. Stand aside from the refrigerator. George and I have come for ice cubes. Say, what are you hiding in the kitchen for, anyway? There’s a party on. These two,” she said to George, “are always in a corner together. Him in his undertaker’s suit, and this one … with rings under his eyes. Like a couple of plotters.” She walked out unsteadily. George, with a set and disapproving face, carried the ice-filled bowl.
“Having a wonderful night, isn’t she?” said Abt.
“Is Harry drunk, too? What’s the matter with them?”
“He may be a little soused. I think he knows what he’s doing,” said Abt. “But it’s really not our business. …”
“I thought they were getting along.”
“There’s trouble of some sort. But, ah!” he made a grimace. “It’s very unlovely.”
“It certainly is,” I said.
“I’ve had my share, too, tonight. That business of George’s damned poem.”
“Oh, I know.”
“I’m going to keep my nose clean.”
I felt increasingly disturbed. Abt looked and sounded exceptionally unhappy. Not that it was unusual for him to be unhappy; he was seldom otherwise. But tonight there was a much larger degree of harshness in his customary mixture of levity and harshness. I had noticed that and, though I had laughed, I had also winced a little when he spoke of stabbing Dr. Rood. I sighed. Of course he was still in love with Minna. Or would it be better to say that he had never recovered from his disappointment in her? But there was more to it than that, I knew—a fundamental discontent which would not yield its meaning to such easy formulations as “love” and “disappointment.” Still more, I was disturbed at myself because I knew that at heart I was tired of Abt’s unhappiness and of seeing him rise to it like a jaded but skillful boxer. I did not want to admit that. I urged my sympathies to work for him. He was unhappy, after all, wasn’t he?
We came back to the living room. Iva was sitting beside Stillman on the piano bench. Servatius and Gilda Hillman had appeared at last; they were dancing. Her face was lowered against his chest; they hung together, moving slowly.
“Nice-looking couple, aren’t they?” Minna said. She was standing behind us. We turned uneasily.
“Well, they are,” she said. “Harry dances well. She’s not bad, either.” We did not reply. “Oh, you’re a couple of fish.” She started to walk away but thought better of it. “You needn’t have such high opinions of yourselves. You’re not the man Harry is, and you’re not, either.”
“Minna,” I said.
“Minna yourself!”
We turned from her. “She’s getting worse and worse,” I said awkwardly. “We ought to leave.” Abt answered nothing.
I told Iva that I was going to get her coat. “What for?” she said. “I don’t want to go yet.” She regarded the matter as settled. She looked around calmly; she was mildly drunk.
I persisted. “It’s getting late.”
“Oh, don’t break up the party,” said Stillman. “Stay a while.”
Red-faced and smiling broadly, Jack Brill came up to us a few minutes later, saying, “Minna’s looking for you, Morris.”
“For me? What does she want?” said Abt.
> “Search me. But I’m pretty sure she’ll get it.”
“Morris!”
“Morris!”
“I told you. Here she comes,” said Brill.
“Morris,” said Minna, putting her hand on his shoulder, “I want you to do something for the party. It’s got to be livened up, it’s going dead.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” said Abt.
“Yes you can. I have a marvelous idea.”
No one asked what this idea was. Jack Brill, after smiling at everyone’s discomfiture, said, “What’s your idea, Minna?”
“Morris is going to hypnotize somebody.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Abt. “I’ve given up amateur hypnotism. You’ll have to ask someone else to liven up your party.” He spoke coldly and without looking at her.
“It’s not a good idea, Minna,” I put it.
“You’re wrong; it’s a wonderful idea. Keep out of this.”
“Oh, drop it, Minna,” said George Hayza. “Nobody wants to see it done.”
“You shut up, too, George. Morris,” she said beseechingly, “I know you’re mad at me. But, please, this once. The party’ll break up if something doesn’t happen soon.”
“I’ve forgotten how. I can’t hypnotize anyone any longer. I haven’t done it for years.”
“Ah, you haven’t forgotten. You can do it. You have a strong mind.”
“Go away, Minna,” I said.
“She’ll get her way,” Jack Brill chuckled. “Wait and see.”
“You encourage her,” I said severely.
“She does everything without encouragement. Don’t blame me.” He still smiled, but back of his smile there was a resentful and inimical coldness. “I just like to see how she goes about getting her way.”
“Morris, please do it.”