Dangling Man

by Saul Bellow

  “What a shame.”

  “It’s not a shame at all. It’s just as well. Just think what the world would be like if their dreams came true.”

  Or if yours came true, I was tempted to say.

  I had a full day of this. He walked home with me and stayed until five o’clock, talking incessantly and smoking so many cigars I had to ventilate the room when he left. I was as tired as though I had spent the day in dissipations of a particularly degrading sort with Steidler as my accomplice. I did not tell Iva of the visit. She disapproves of him.

  February 2

  Still no fruits and flowers. I have been too lazy to stir out. But I know I am not lazy. Here is an incalculable deception. Lazy we are not. When we seem so, our cyclonic wishes are baffled, and pride requires us to be indifferent.

  The Egyptians were right to make one of their gods a cat. They, the worshipers, knew that only a cat’s eyes could see into their interior darkness.

  The papers say no husbands have been drafted from Illinois since last summer. But now the supply of men is lower, and married men without dependents will soon be called up. Steidler asked me how I was using my liberty. I answered that I was preparing myself spiritually, that I was willing to be a member of the Army, but not a part of it. He thought this a very witty answer. He believes I am a natural comedian and laughs at everything I say. The more serious I become, the harder he laughs.

  He now reveals that he lived in the County Hospital for three months, last year, in the internes’ quarters. The officials knew nothing about it. His friend Shailer, who was then in residence, took him in, and the other internes agreed to keep his secret. He ate in the cafeteria, and his clothes were washed in the hospital laundry. He made his pocket money at cards; there were escapades and jokes; he was introduced to patients as a specialist; he gave advice. The internes were genial and admiring; he was hilarious, Shailer’s room was crowded all night long. He was given a party right in the hospital before he left for California. And I suppose it is all true. He exaggerates, but he does not lie.

  February 3

  An Hour with the Spirit of Alternatives.

  “Let’s have a talk, shall we, Joseph?”

  “Glad to.”

  “We’ll make ourselves comfortable.”

  “You can’t be very comfortable here.”

  “Perfectly all right. I thrive on small hardships.”

  “You’ll find all you need.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who’s uneasy.”

  “Well, the fact is, though I’m glad to have this opportunity, I can’t quite place you.”

  “By name?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course not. I go by several.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh—‘But on the Other Hand,’ or ‘Tu As Raison Aussi.’ I always know who I am; that’s the important thing.”

  “An enviable position.”

  “I often think so.”

  “Have an orange.”

  “Oh, thanks, no.”

  “Take one, go on.”

  “They’re so expensive now.”

  “To please me.”

  “Oh, well. …”

  “I’ve grown fond of you. I like your manner.”

  “We’ll each take half.”

  “Good enough.”

  “So you like me, Joseph?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That’s flattering.”

  “No, really I do. I appreciate you.”

  “Do you take quick likes and dislikes?”

  “I try to be reasonable.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “To Understand?”

  “You want me to trust Unreason?”

  “I want nothing; I suggest. …”

  “Feelings?”

  “You have them, Joseph.”

  “Instincts?”

  “And instincts.”

  “I know the argument. I see what you’re after.”

  “What?”

  “That human might is too small to pit against the unsolvables. Our nature, mind’s nature, is weak, and only the heart can be relied on.”

  “What a rush you’re in, Joseph. I didn’t say that.”

  “But you must have meant it. Reason has to conquer itself. Then what are we given reason for? To discover the blessedness of unreason? That’s a very poor argument.”

  “You’re inventing a case against me. You’re to be congratulated on your conclusions, but they’re off the point. However, you’ve had a hard time.”

  “Am having.”

  “Quite so.”

  “And will continue to have.”

  “Of course. You must be prepared for it.”

  “I am. I am.”

  “It’s sensible of you to expect so little.”

  “But it’s sad, you must admit.”

  “It’s a matter of knowing how much to ask for.”

  “How much?”

  “I’m talking about happiness.”

  “I’m talking about asking to be human. We’re not worse than the others.”

  “What others?”

  “Those who proved it possible to be human.”

  “Ah, in the past.”

  “Listen, Tu As Raison Aussi. We abuse the present too much, don’t you think so?”

  “You’re not so fond of it.”

  “Fond! What a word!”

  “Alienated, then.”

  “That’s bad, too.”

  ““It’s popular,”

  “There’s a lot of talk about alienation. It’s a fool’s plea.”

  “Is it?”

  “You can divorce your wife or abandon your child, but what can you do with yourself?”

  “You can’t banish the world by decree if it’s in you. Is that it, Joseph?”

  “How can you? You have gone to its schools and seen its movies, listened to its radios, read its magazines. What if you declare you are alienated, you say you reject the Hollywood dream, the soap opera, the cheap thriller? The very denial implicates you.”

  “You can decide that you want to forget these things.”

  “The world comes after you. It presents you with a gun or a mechanic’s tool, it singles you out for this part or that, brings you ringing news of disasters and victories, shunts you back and forth, abridges your rights, cuts off your future, is clumsy or crafty, oppressive, treacherous, murderous, black, whorish, venal, inadvertently naïve or funny. Whatever you do, you cannot dismiss it.”

  “What then?”

  “The failing may be in us, in me. A weakness of vision.”

  “Aren’t you asking too much of yourself?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Where shall I put these pips?”

  “I’m sorry; have you been holding them? Here, in this ash tray. I’m telling you. It’s too easy to abjure it or detest it. Too narrow. Too cowardly.”

  “If you could see, what do you think you would see?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps that we were the feeble-minded children of angels.”

  “Now you’re just amusing yourself, Joseph.”

  “Very well, I would see where those capacities have gone to which we once owed our greatness.”

  “That would be tragic.”

  “I don’t say it wouldn’t be. Have you any tobacco?”

  “No.”

  “Or paper? If I had paper I could roll a cigarette out of these butts.”

  “I’m sorry I came empty-handed. If you’re not alienated, why do you quarrel with so many people? I know you’re not a misanthrope. Is it because they force you to recognize that you belong to their world?”

  “I was wrong, or else put it badly. I didn’t say there was no feeling of alienation, but that we should not make a doctrine of our feeling.”

  “Is that a public or a private belief?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “What about politics?”<
br />
  “Do you want to discuss politics with me? With me? Now?”

  “Since you refuse to subscribe to alienation, perhaps you might be interested in changing existence.”

  “Ha, ha, ha! Have you any ideas?”

  “It’s really not my place, you know. …”

  “I know, but you started it.”

  “My position. You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “So, about changing existence. …”

  “I never enjoyed being a revolutionary.”

  “No? Didn’t you hate anyone?”

  “I hated, but I didn’t enjoy. As a matter of fact—”

  “Yes—”

  “You’re so attentive—. I regarded politics as an inferior activity. Plato tells us that if everything were as it should be, the best men would avoid office, not vie for it.”

  “They did once vie for it.”

  “They did. Public life is disagreeable. It’s forced on one.”

  “I often hear that complaint. But all this is neither here nor there as far as measures to be taken are concerned.”

  “But with whom, under what circumstances, how, toward what ends?”

  “Ah, that’s it, isn’t it? With whom.”

  “You don’t believe in the historic roles of classes, do you?”

  “You keep forgetting. My province is …”

  “Alternatives. Excuse me. With whom, to go on. A terrible, unanswerable question. With men dispersed into separate corners, incommunicado? One of their few remaining liberties is the liberty to wonder what will happen next.”

  “Still, if you had the power to see. … Here you are willing to say that it is weakness of imagination that leads to alienation but not, it seems, that a similar weakness is impairing you politically. If, you could see it over-all. …Where are you going?”

  “Just to look in my coat for a cigarette; I may have left one there.”

  “If you could see it that way.”

  “There isn’t a smoke in the house.”

  “Over-all. …”

  “You mean, if I were a political genius. I’m not. Now what do you face?”

  “What to do under the circumstances.”

  “Try to live.”

  “How?”

  “Tu As Raison Aussi, you’re not giving much help. By a plan, a program, perhaps an obsession.”

  “An ideal construction.”

  “A German phrase. And you with a French name.”

  “I have to be above such prejudices.”

  “Well, it’s a lovely phrase. An ideal construction, an obsessive device. There have been innumerable varieties: for study, for wisdom, bravery, war, the benefits of cruelty, for art; the God-man of the ancient cultures, the Humanistic full man, the courtly lover, the knight, the ecclesiastic, the despot, the ascetic, the millionaire, the manager. I could name hundreds of these ideal constructions, each with its assertions and symbols, each finding—in conduct, in God, in art, in money—its particular answer and each proclaiming: ‘This is the only possible way to meet chaos.’ Even someone like my friend Steidler is under the influence of an ideal construction of an inferior kind. It is inferior because it is loosely made and little thought has gone into it. Nevertheless it is real. He would willingly let go everything in his life that is not dramatic. Only he has, I am afraid, a shallow idea of drama. Simple, inevitable things are not dramatic enough for him. He has a notion of the admirable style. It is poor stuff. Nobility of gesture is what he wants. And, for all his boasted laziness he is willing to pursue his ideal until his eyes burst from his head and his feet from his shoes.”

  “Do you want one of those constructions, Joseph?”

  “Doesn’t it seem that we need them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t get along without them?”

  “If you see it that way.”

  “Apparently we need to give ourselves some exclusive focus, passionate and engulfing.”

  “One might say that.”

  “But what of the gap between the ideal construction and the real world, the truth?”

  “Yes. …”

  “How are they related?”

  “An interesting problem.”

  “Then there’s this: the obsession exhausts the man. It can become his enemy. It often does.”

  “H’m.”

  “What do you say to all this?”

  “What do I say?”

  “Yes, what do you think? You just sit there, looking at the ceiling and giving equivocal answers.”

  “I haven’t answered. I’m not supposed to give answers.”

  “No. What an inoffensive career you’ve chosen.”

  “You’re forgetting to be reasonable.”

  “Reasonable! Go on, you make me sick. The sight of you makes me sick. You make me queasy at the stomach with your suave little, false little looks.”

  “Joseph, look here …!”

  “Oh, get out. Get out of here. You’re two-faced. You’re not to be trusted, you damned diplomat, you cheat!” Furious, I flung a handful of orange peel at him, and he fled the room.

  February 4

  The landlady, Mrs. Kiefer, had another stroke yesterday that paralyzed her legs. According to Mrs. Bartlett, whom Mrs. Briggs has engaged as a nurse, she can’t live more than a few weeks. The windows are kept darkened; the halls and stairways smell of disinfectant, so that, going up to the landing with its stained-glass window, one imagines oneself in the hospital of a religious order. Except when Vanaker comes or goes, the house is quiet. He still is noisy; he has not learned to close the door when he goes down the hall. To stop him, I have to come out and march threateningly toward the bathroom. Thereupon he slams it shut. I have several times made general but loud and menacing remarks about decency and politeness. But he is either too drunk or too witless to change. When I do these things, I make myself ill. When I step out of the door to reprimand and stop him I am merely a nervous or irascible young man and I feel the force on me of a bad, harsh mood which I despise in others—the nastiness of a customer to a waiter or of a parent to a child. Iva is the same way. She gasps, “Oh, the fool!” when I go into the hall with a cross pull at the door. I suppose she means Vanaker; but may she not also mean me?

  February 5

  My Present ill temper first manifested itself last winter. Before we moved out of our flat I had a disgraceful fist fight with the landlord, Mr. Gesell.

  That fight had been on the horizon a long time. Throughout the summer we had been on good terms. We exerted ourselves to be courteous to Gesell and to Mrs. Gesell, who made a daily racket in her shop downstairs with a machine-powered chisel. She was an amateur sculptress. Often the house trembled. Then she borrowed our books, and brought them back with stone dust on the pages. We did not complain.

  But, when the frosts began, the house was underheated. We could not bathe at night; in December we had to go to bed at nine, when the radiators turned cold. Then, during one week in January, the furnace broke down. Mr. Gesell was an electrician himself; to save money, he undertook the repairs. But he had his job to attend to, so he worked at the furnace evenings and Sundays. The fireplace stifled us when we tried to use it, it was blocked with bricks. Below, Mrs. Gesell, surrounded by heat lamps, worked away at the figure of a sand hog she was designing for the new subway—she was going to enter a competition. When we went down to complain, she did not answer the bell. We ate supper with our sweaters on.

  The gas stove in the kitchen, which was now our only source of heat, began to give us headaches. We lived with Myron for a week, the three of us in one bed. I caught Mr. Gesell at last, when he was airing the dog. He joked about the cold, and said I was so strapping I could bear it. He pounded my arms playfully, exciting the dog, from whom I shrank. Gesell said. “You’ll do. You’re pretty husky for a guy that leads such a soft life. Even though you couldn’t stand up a day in my line.” He was a strongly built man, about forty years old. He dressed in old t
rousers and flannel shirts. His wife wore the same costume—jeans, shirt, and neckcloth. He began to relate how near the two of them had come to freezing, during the depression, in a bare studio on Lake Park Avenue. They burned orange crates while waiting for the Relief to deliver coal. They took down the curtains and stuffed them in cracks against the wind. “The depression’s over,” I said. He laughed so hard he had to take hold of my arm to keep himself up. “Say, you’re all right, you are.” The dog, with rueful red eyes, watched the snow wreathing back and forth over the street. “We’ll see what we can do about you,” said Gesell.

  A little heat began to seep up, but the house was not really warm. Iva hit upon the plan of holding up the rent. On the fifth of the month, Gesell made belligerent representations. Iva retoned angrily. She didn’t expect an artist to make a good landlord. “But you, Mr. Gesell!” “An artist!” I snorted, thinking of that poor sand hog with his nose and thick legs. Gesell probably carried this back to Beth Gesell, for she stopped speaking to me. There were hard feelings.

  But in February things took a turn for the better. In our encounters, as we went in and out of the house, we began to greet one another once more. The rent was paid, the heat rose, the hot water returned. I entered one day, with a check, to find the Gesells having breakfast at a table you might expect to find in a log cabin. The Dalmatian came and rubbed himself against me embarrassingly—poor animal, he was an adjunct and had no life of his own. Gesell took the check with thanks and began to write out a receipt. Beth, resting her chin on the back of her hand, was looking out of the window, watching the snow. She was a fat woman, with red hair cut in square, boxlike, masculine fashion. I began to think she was still angry and did not want to speak to me, but she was watching the fall of soft, heavy flakes, and all at once she said: