by Saul Bellow
I have never found another street that resembled St. Dominique. It was in a slum between a market and a hospital. I was generally intensely preoccupied with what went on in it and watched from the stairs and the windows. Little since then has worked upon me with such force as, say, the sight of a driver trying to raise his fallen horse, of a funeral passing through the snow, or of a cripple who taunted his brother. And the pungency and staleness of its stores and cellars, the dogs, the boys, the French and immigrant women, the beggars with sores and deformities whose like I was not to meet again until I was old enough to read of Villon’s Paris, the very breezes in the narrow course of that street, have remained so clear to me that I sometimes think it is the only place where I was ever allowed to encounter reality. My father blamed himself bitterly for the poverty that forced him to bring us up in a slum and worried lest I see too much. And I did see, in a curtainless room near the market, a man rearing over someone on a bed, and, on another occasion, a Negro with a blond woman on his lap. But less easily forgotten were a cage with a rat in it thrown on a bonfire, and two quarreling drunkards, one of whom walked away bleeding, drops falling from his head like the first slow drops of a heavy rain in summer, a crooked line of drops left on the pavement as he walked.
January 6
Abt has sent me a copy of a pamphlet he wrote on the government of the Territories. He expects a flattering comment, no doubt, and I shall have to rig one up. He will want me to tell him that no one else could have written such a pamphlet. Suppose I were to try to tell him what I thought of him. He would reply coldly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He has a way of turning aside everything he has no desire to understand.
Abt, more than anyone I have known, has lived continually in need of being consequential. Early in life he discovered that he was quicker, abler, than the rest of us, and that he could easily outstrip us in learning and in skills. He felt he could be great in anything he chose. We roomed together in Madison as freshmen. He was very busy that first year keeping up all his accomplishments, his music, his politics, his class work. Living with him had a bad effect on me, for I withdrew from any field he entered. People came from other campuses to consult him on doctrinal matters; no one had as much out-of-the-way information as he; he read foreign political journals the rest of us had never heard of, and reports of party congresses, those dun, mimeographed sheets on international decisions in France and Spain. No one was so subtle with opponents. Nor did many students get as much attention as he got from his teachers. A few were afraid of him and learned to avoid challenging him publicly. Late afternoons, he played the piano. I would often stop by for him at the music building on the way to dinner and spend half an hour listening. He did not waste time maturing, he did not make any of the obvious mistakes. His hold was too good. That winter he was Lenin, Mozart, and Locke all rolled into one. But there was unfortunately not enough time to be all three. And so, in the spring, he passed through a crisis. It was necessary to make a choice. But, whatever it was he chose, that would be the most important. How could it be otherwise? He gave up attending meetings and practising the piano, he banished the party reports as trash, and decided to become a political philosopher. There was a general purge. Everything else went. Anti-Duhring and The Critique of the Gotha Program sank to the rear of the bottom shelf of his bookcase and were supplanted at the top by Bentham and Locke. Now he had decided, and in dead earnestness he followed greatness. Inevitably, he fell short of his models. He would never admit that he wanted to become another Locke, but there he was, wearing himself thin with the effort of emulation, increasingly angry at himself, and unable to admit that the scale of his ambition was defeating him.
He is stubborn. Just as, in the old days, it disgraced him to confess that he was not familiar with a book or a statement that came under his jurisdiction, he now cannot acknowledge that his plan has miscarried. But then, it bothers him to be found guilty even of small errors. He does not like to forget a date or a name or the proper form of a foreign verb. He cannot be wrong, that is his difficulty. If you warn him that there is a fissure at his feet, he answers, “no, you must be mistaken.” But when it can no longer be ignored he says, “Do you see it?” as though he had discovered it.
Of course, we suffer from bottomless avidity. Our lives are so precious to us, we are so watchful of waste. Or perhaps a better name for it would be the Sense of Personal Destiny. Yes, I think that is better than avidity. Shall my life by one-thousandth of an inch fall short of its ultimate possibility? It is a different thing to value oneself, and to prize oneself crazily. And then there are our plans, idealizations. These are dangerous, too. They can consume us like parasites, eat us, drink us, and leave us lifelessly prostrate. And yet we are always inviting the parasite, as if we were eager to be drained and eaten.
It is because we have been taught there is no limit to what a man can be. Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be. Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. But whether, after life, he went to hell or to heaven, his place among other men was given. It could not be contested. But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on. Great minds, great beauties, great lovers and criminals surround us. From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had that right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions; to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could be great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen. Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging pursues and maddens us. The fear lies in us like a cloud. It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm and hate and wounding rain out of us.
January 7
Adler’s bureau is sending him to San Francisco for two weeks. He is leaving tomorrow. Our talk will have to be put off.
January 8
John Pearl writes of an exhibit of his pictures at a women’s club in New York. It was not a success. For want of space they crowded his things into the dining room, then held so many Red Cross luncheons that no one could get in. He sold nothing. A lady who admired a still life wanted to order a flower painting for her daughter’s bedroom—three flowers in a blue vase. “Only three? A fourth flower will cost you twenty-five dollars more. It’ll fill the picture out. That’s very reasonable.” She pondered this but in the end she decided three would be enough. Her husband grew peonies; she would have the flowers and a vase sent over. “I’m sorry,” Johnny said. “I thought we were talking about roses. Peonies are too big for the price. I’ll have to charge ten dollars extra for each flower. It’s the standard rate for flowers with a three-inch diameter. A lemon will be ten dollars more, unpeeled. Half-peeled, fifteen dollars.”
“Are there rates for everything?” she said. She had become suspicious.
“In a manner of speaking, there are. They’re a little lower than the ones I quoted you. The Jones Street Convention of 1930 set them lower. But, with inflation. … ” Here she fled.
“Ethel said it was nasty of me, but the woman was so serious I could not resist joking. I didn’t think it would lose me the commission.”
He still has his job with the advertising agency, drawing “cartoon faces of bilious men and headachy office girls.” And that, he goes on, serious all at once, “is the adult, commonsense, wise world. I am exhilar
ated by the tremendous unimportance of my work. It is nonsense. My employers are nonsensical. The job therefore leaves me free. There’s nothing to it. In a way it’s like getting a piece of bread from a child in return for wiggling your ears. It is childish. I am the only one in this fifty-three-story building who knows how childish it is. Everybody else takes it seriously. Because this is a fifty-three-story building, they think it must be serious. ‘This is life!’ I say, this is pish, nonsense, nothing! The real world is the world of art and of thought. There is only one worth-while sort of work, that of the imagination.”
It is an attractive idea, it confers a sort of life on him, sets him off from the debased dullness of those fifty-three stories. He is not making this up. I know him. He has no reason to lie to me. He is telling me what he feels: that he has escaped a trap. That really is a victory to celebrate. I am fascinated by it, and a little jealous. He can maintain himself. Is it because he is an artist? I believe it is. Those acts of the imagination save him. But what about me? I have no talent for that sort of thing. My talent, if I have one at all, is for being a citizen, or what is today called, most apologetically, a good man. Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute for the imagination?
That, I am unable to answer. But certainly he is better off. There he is in New York, painting; and in spite of the calamity, the lies and moral buggery, the odium, the detritus of wrong and sorrow dropped on every heart, in spite of these, he can keep a measure of cleanliness and freedom. Besides, those acts of the imagination are in the strictest sense not personal. Through them he is connected with the best part of mankind. He feels this and he can never be isolated, left aside. He has a community. I have this six-sided box. And goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail. My perspectives end in the walls. Nothing of the future comes to me. Only the past, in its shabbiness and innocence. Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me.
When the Italian General Bergonzoli (I think it was Bergonzoli) was captured in Libya, he would not discuss military matters or the strategy that led to his defeat, but said, “Please! I am not a soldier. I am primarily a poet!” Who does not recognize the advantage of the artist, these days?
January 11
The other night Iva was searching through the shelves for a book she had put away months before and was musing aloud about its disappearance.
I was trimming my nails, listening absently, guiding the tiny crescent shears away from the quick, and was, as I can become in small matters, preoccupied with the gathering up of the clippings, when suddenly I remembered that I had lent Kitty Daumler a book.
“What did you say you were looking for?”
“Didn’t you hear me before? A small, blue book, Dubliners. Have you seen it?”
“It must be around.”
“Help me look.”
“It’s probably buried among the others. Why don’t you read another book? There’re plenty.”
But Iva would not be so easily dissuaded. She went on searching, piling books on the floor near my chair.
“You won’t find it,” I said after a time.
“Why not?”
“These things have a way of dropping out of sight and turning up months later. It may have fallen behind the case.”
“Let’s move it.”
“Not I. Next time Marie holds a general cleaning.” I picked up the clippings in pinches and threw them into the wastebasket. “I ought to bury them, by rights.”
“Those? Why?” She stood up, in her blue figured wrap, to ease her back against the wall. “I can’t stay bent over very long. Old age.”
“Nails, hair, all cuttings and waste from the body. Fear of sorcery.”
“The door’s been locked for days; he couldn’t have taken it. Anyhow, what would he do with Dubliners?”
“Vanaker?”
“Yes.” Iva was still sure he was responsible for the disappearance of her perfume bottles.
“I’ll dig the book up tomorrow,” I said.
“But it should be here.”
“Very well, it should. But if it’s not, it won’t appear, no matter how determined you are.”
“You mean it isn’t in the room?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I mean you’d rather waste an evening looking for it than read another book.”
She said indignantly: “You told me to read it yourself. You insisted.”
“But that was long ago, months and months ago. You should have read it in a few hours.”
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s months and months since you took an interest in me. Lately, for all you care, I might just as well not be here. You pay no attention to what I say. If I didn’t come home for a week you wouldn’t miss me.”
I received this charge in silence.
“Well?” she said aggressively.
“Ah, that’s all foolishness.”
“That’s no sort of answer.”
“Iva, it’s this situation we’re in. It’s changed us both. But it isn’t permanent.”
“You mean you’ll go away soon, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Oh,” I said, irritated, “don’t nag. It is the situation. You know it is.”
“It certainly has changed you.”
“Of course it has; it would change anyone.”
Rising, I took my coat from the hanger and went to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To get some air. It’s stuffy here.”
“Can’t you see it’s raining? But I suppose even that’s better than spending the evening with a nagging wife.”
“Right, it is better!” I exclaimed. I had no more patience. “For ten cents they’ll bunk me in a flophouse, no questions asked. You needn’t expect me back tonight”
“That’s right, advertise to the entire house. …”
“It’s just like you to worry about the house. Damn the house. It’s more shameful to act this way than that the house should know. I don’t give a bloody damn about the house!”
“Joseph!” she said.
I shut the door with a crash, already aware, under my anger, that this was beneath me and altogether out of proportion to the provocation. I pulled my hat down against the rain. Our windows, with their glowing shades, set two orange rectangles, trade-marks of warmth and comfort, against the downpour and the dark, the glitter of the trees, the armor of ice on the street. The intense cold of the past week had lifted. Fog had succeeded it, rising in spongy gray blooms from the soaked walks, hovering in the yards and over the hollows blinking with rain and changes of color from the muffled signal lights—green, amber, red, amber, green, shuttering down the street. Mr. Vanaker’s window went up. He threw a bottle, using the neck as a hilt. It landed softly into the clay, beside the others; there were dozens of bottles among the bushes, their high shoulders streaming as though drops of mercury were falling on them from the withes. The window was run down hastily.
My shoes, their once neat points scuffed and turned up, squashed, as I walked, through half-a-dozen leaks. I moved toward the corner, inhaling the odors of wet clothes and of wet coal, wet paper, wet earth, drifting with the puffs of fog. Low, far out, a horn uttered a dull cry, subsided; again. The street lamp bent over the curb like a woman who cannot turn homeward until she has found the ring or the coin she dropped in the ice and gutter silt. I heard behind me the clicking of a feminine stride and, for a moment, thought that Iva had come after me, but it was a stranger who passed at the awning of the corner store, her face made bleary by the woolly light and the shadowy fur-piece at her throat. The awning heaved; twists of water ran through its rents. Once more the horn bawled over the water, warning the lake tugs from the headlands. It was not hard to ima
gine that there was no city here at all, and not even a lake but, instead, a swamp and that despairing bawl crossing it; wasting trees instead of dwellings, and runners of vine instead of telephone wires. The bell of an approaching streetcar drove this vision off. I hailed it and, paying my fare, remained on the platform. It was not far to Kitty’s. If my shoes had been watertight, I would have walked.
My purpose was not to retrieve the book—though, of course, I might as well ask her to return it while I was there—but to see Kitty.
I don’t recall how she came to ask me for the book, nor how it was that I volunteered to give it to her. She would not have heard of it, and I cannot conceive in what connection I mentioned it. Here was one more conflux I could not trace or interpret. Kitty—but I do not say this in his praise—is not an intelligent or even clever girl. She is simple, warm, uncomplicated, and matter-of-fact. Two years ago I had mapped out a Caribbean tour for her, and she had come in later to tell me what a good time she had had and to ask me to appraise some of the things she had bought. For that purpose I went to her apartment. She accepted my verdict of her tourist stuff so casually and treated me with such marked friendliness that I began to think—not without a touch of pleased excitement—that she was less interested in the appraisal than in me. At the first opportunity, I mentioned Iva, but it was apparent from her reaction or lack of reaction that she had taken my being married for granted. For her, she said, marriage as such did not exist. There were only people. Then began a conversation on marriage and love which I don’t care to remember in detail. I made it abundantly plain that while I would talk of such matters I would not venture beyond talk. I was, however, flattered that such a handsome woman should be drawn to me. She was saying that some of the others on the cruise had made themselves absurd with the guides and beach boys. She could not stand that kind of looseness, and the pretty, characterless romantic Latin faces filled her with aversion. They were such vapid-looking men.