by Saul Bellow
“Good! I am. Now, what do you want me to do? Did you come to tell me that I was bad-tempered?”
“I came to see you.”
“That’s mighty handsome of you.”
In rising anger, he stared at me, his mouth pursing. I began to laugh, and at that he rose and made for the door. I pulled him back.
“Here, don’t go, Mike. Don’t be a fool. Sit down. I wasn’t laughing at you. I just happened to think that I’m always hoping a visitor will come. When he does come, I insult him.”
“I’m glad you see it,” he muttered.
“I do see it. Certainly I see it.”
“Why jump on people? Good Lord. …”
“It just turns out that way. As the French say, ‘c’est plus fort que moi.’ Does that prove that I’m not happy to see you? Not at all. It’s not really a contradiction. It’s natural. Almost a welcome, one might say.”
“What a welcome,” he said; but he seemed somewhat mollified.
“I see people so seldom, I’ve forgotten how to act. I don’t want to be bad-tempered. But, on the other hand, the people who accuse me of that haven’t exactly been beating the woods in searching parties. Things have changed, Mike. You’re busy and prosperous—best of luck to you. But we may as well be honest about this.”
“Now what’s coming?”
“We’re temporarily in different classes, and it has an effect on us. Oh, yes, it does. For instance, the way you took in this room, the way you looked around …”
“I don’t get what you’re driving at,” he said in perplexity.
“You get it. You’re not stupid. Don’t act like Abt, saying, ‘I can’t follow you.’ We are in different classes. The very difference in our clothes shows it.”
“What a change,” he said. “What a difference.” He shook his head in regret and reminiscence. “You used to be an absolutely reasonable guy.”
“I was sociable.”
“Now you sound so wild.”
The subject would bear no more discussion. “How was your trip?” I asked.
He stayed all afternoon and tried to make an old-time visit of it. But, after such a start, that was impossible. He was hale and businesslike, wanting no further trouble with me. So, haltingly, we covered a variety of subjects—public opinion, the war, our friends, and again the war. Minna Servatius was about to have a baby. I had heard something about that. George Hayza was expecting a naval commission. I had heard about that, also. There was a rumor that Abt was to be sent to Puerto Rico. Adler said he would find out definitely next week. He was going East.
“You see, Joseph,” he said at four o’clock, “there’s nothing we’d rather do than come and chat with you as we used to. But that’s all gone now. We’re busy. You’ll be busy yourself, one of these days, busier than you’d ever care to be.”
“Yes, things change. C’est la guerre. C’est la vie. Good old punch lines.”
“What a Frenchman you’ve become.”
“Say, do you remember Jeff Forman?”
“I read about him. He got a posthumous medal. Poor Jeff.”
“C’est la vie.”
“That’s not funny,” said Adler disapprovingly.
“I was just quoting from the last war. I didn’t mean to be funny. We can’t do anything for Jeff, anyway, by pulling a long face. Can we?”
“I guess not.”
And, in this manner, the visit drew to a close.
“When you’re in the East,” I said, “look up John Pearl. He needs a breath of Chicago. You ought to stop in and see him, I think.” I added, with a laugh, “You might run into another Chicagoan in New York. Steidler. He hasn’t been here for a long time. My guess is he took his brother’s money.”
“Alf?”
“His brother wrote a song and wanted Alf to take it to New York for him. He’s looking for a publisher.”
“If I thought there was a chance of running into Steidler, I wouldn’t see Pearl. Why isn’t he in the Army?”
“He’s leaving the war to us normal bastards, he says.”
“You’ve been seeing him. I wouldn’t. He’s not your kind. Stay away from him.”
“Oh, oh, now! He can’t hurt me. Besides, beggars can’t be choosers. I’m quoting my niece. Lines addressed to me.”
“Really? Amos’s girl?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “She’s quite grown-up.”
And so Myron left, plainly dissatisfied with the results of his call. I went down with him into the street. We tramped to the corner over the discolored snow. While we waited to cross to the car stop, Myron offered to lend me money.
“No,” I said, and gently moved his hand away. “We have enough. We get along very well.” He put the money back in his purse. “Here comes the Fifty-five car. Better run for it.” He gave me a final pat on the shoulder and sprinted across, whipping off his hat as he went, to hail the motorman.
March 3
Dolly phoned to ask us to dinner next Sunday. I said we had already accepted another invitation.
The Farsons have returned from Detroit, their training over. Susie dropped in to see Iva at the library. The baby had grippe; not a serious case. They have decided to send her to Farson’s parents in Dakota, while they themselves go to California to work in an aircraft factory. Susie is in good spirits and is delighted at going to California. Walter missed the child more than she did. They intend to send for her as soon as they settle down.
March 5
There is a woman who goes through the neighborhood with a shopping bag full of Christian Science literature. She stops young men and talks to them. Since we cover the same streets, I encounter her often, but she keeps forgetting me, and it is not always possible to avoid her. For her part, she has no understanding of the art of stopping people. She rushes to block you with her body clumsily, almost despairingly. If she misses, she is incapable of following up, and if you succeed in eluding her—if you want to elude her, if you have the heart to continue doing so time after time—she can only stand, defeated, staring after you. If you do stop, she takes out her tracts and begins to speak.
She must be nearly fifty, a tall and rather heavy woman. But she has a sickly face—thin chapped lips, square yellow teeth, recessed brown eyes which you vainly read and reread for a meaning. The skin under her eyes reveals tiny, purple, intersecting vessels. Her hair is grizzled, her forehead is broad and blazed with a scar that resembles an old bullet wound. She speaks in a rapid whisper. I listen and wait for an opportunity to disengage myself.
Her speech is memorized. I watch her chapped lips through which the words come, so dry and rapid, often pronounced as though she did not understand them. The words, the words trip her fervor. She says she has talked to many young men who are about to go to war, who are going to face destruction. Her duty is to tell them that the means of saving themselves is at hand if they want it. Nothing but belief can save them. She has spoken to many others who have come back from the jungles and the fox holes, surviving the maiming fire only because of their faith. The doctrines of the science are not superstitions but true science, as has been proved. She has a pamphlet of testimonials, written by soldiers who know how to believe.
Meanwhile her face and the hard brown shells of her eyes do not change. She writes on a pad while she is talking. When she is done, she hands you the paper. It contains the names and addresses of the various churches and Reading Rooms in the neighborhood. And that is all. She is now at your mercy. She waits. Her lips come together like the seams of a badly sewn baseball. Her face burns and wastes under your eyes; the very hairs at the corners of her mouth seem already to have shriveled. When, after a long pause, you do not offer to buy one of the tracts, she walks away, her run-down shoes knocking on the pavement, her load swinging as heavily as a bag of sand.
Yesterday she was sicker than ever. Her skin was the color of brick dust; her breath was sour. In her old tam that half-covered the scar, and her rough, blackened coat buttoned to the neck, she suggested th
e figure of a minor political leader in exile, unwelcome, shabby, burning with a double fever.
She addressed me in the usual whisper.
“You spoke to me two weeks ago,” I said.
“Oh. Well … I have a pamphlet here about the beliefs of Science. And testimony by …” She groped. Then I felt sure it had taken her these extra minutes to hear what I had said. I was about to ask, “Don’t you feel well?” but, from fear of offending her, I held back. Her lips were more badly chapped than I had ever seen them. On the protruding point of the upper, a scab had formed.
“The men from Bataan,” I said. “The one you told me about last time.”
“Yes. Five cents.”
“Which would you rather sell me, this or the other?”
She held out the one with the veterans’ testimony.
“You’re going to the Army, too? This is the one.” She took the coin and slid it into her pocket, which was edged with a sort of charred fur. Then she said, “You’re going to read it.”
I don’t know what prevented me from saying yes.
“I’ll try to find time for it,” I said.
“No, then you aren’t going to. I’ll take it back.”
“I want to keep it.”
“You can have your nickel. Here it is back.”
I refused it She shook her lowered head as a child might, sorrowing.
“I’m going to read this,” I said. I thrust the pamphlet into my coat.
“You mustn’t he proud,” she said. She misunderstood my smile. At that moment she looked very grimly sick; though her eyes retained their hard brown centers, the whites had lost their moisture and, in each, a dry streak of vein had appeared.
“I give you my word, I’ll read it.”
She had held out her hand with a stiff movement of her arm to receive the pamphlet back. Now her hand went back to her side. For a while, as I watched her face with its small chin and large, marred forehead, I thought she had lost all sense of her whereabouts. But she soon picked up her bag and walked away.
March 10
Rain, yesterday, that turned into snow overnight. Cold again.
March 12
Received a note from Kitty, asking why I hadn’t stopped by lately. I tore it up before Iva could see it. I haven’t thought about Kitty lately. I can’t be missing her much.
March 15
Sunday was warm, hinting at spring. We visited the Almstadts. In the evening I walked in Humboldt Park, around the lagoon, across the bridge to the boathouse where we used to discuss Man and Superman and where, even earlier, with John Pearl, I pelted the lovers on the benches below the balcony with crab apples. The air had a brackish smell of wet twigs and moldering brown seed pods, but it was soft, and through it rose, with indistinct but thrilling reality, meadows and masses of trees, blue and rufous stone and reflecting puddles. After dark, as I was returning, a warm, thick rain began falling with no more warning than a gasp. I ran.
March 16
Another Talk with the Spirit of Alternatives.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming back.”
“Yes?”
“And I’d like to apologize.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“And explain.”
“I’m used to abuse. It’s in the line of duty.”
“But I want to say—I’m a chopped and shredded man.”
“Easily exasperated.”
“You know how it is. I’m harried, pushed, badgered, worried, nagged, heckled. …”
“By what? Conscience?”
“Well, it’s a kind of conscience. I don’t respect it as I do my own. It’s the public part of me. It goes deep. It’s the world internalized, in short.”
“What does it want?”
“It wants me to stop living this way. It’s prodding me to the point where I shall no longer care what happens to me.”
“When you will give up?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Well, why don’t you do that? Here you are preparing; yourself for further life. …”
“And you think I should quit.”
“The vastest experience of your time doesn’t have much to do with living. Have you thought of preparing yourself for that?”
“Dying? You’re angry because I threw the orange peel.”
“I mean it.”
“What’s there to prepare for? You can’t prepare for anything but living. You don’t have to know anything to be dead. You have merely to learn that you will one day be dead. I learned that long ago. No, we’re both joking. I know you didn’t mean that.”
“Whatever I mean, you get it twisted up.”
“No. But I’m half-serious. You want me to worship the anti-life. I’m saying that there are no values outside life. There is nothing outside life.”
“We’re not going to argue about that. But you have impossible aims. Everybody else is dangling, too. When and if you survive you can start setting yourself straight.”
“But, Tu As Raison Aussi, this is important. And what’s the rush? There are important questions here. There’s the whole question of my real and not superficial business as a man.”
“Oh, now, really. What makes you think you can handle these things by yourself?”
“With whom can I start but myself?”
“Nah, foolishness!”
“No, but the questions have to be answered.”
“Aren’t you tired of this room?”
“Weary of it.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be in motion, outside, somewhere?”
“Sometimes I think nothing could be better.”
“Do you really think you can handle all your own questions?”
“I’m not always sure.”
“Then your position is weak indeed.”
“Look, there are moments when I feel it would be wisest to go to my draft board and ask to have my number called at once.”
“Well?”
“I would be denying my inmost feelings if I said I wanted to be by-passed and spared from knowing what the rest of my generation is undergoing. I don’t want to be humped protectively over my life. I am neither so corrupt nor so hard-boiled that I can savor my life only when it is in danger of extinction. But, on the other hand, its value here in this room is decreasing day by day. Soon it may become distasteful to me.”
“There, you see it yourself.”
“Wait, I’m collecting all my feelings and my misgivings. I am somewhat afraid of the vanity of thinking that I can make my own way toward clarity. But it is even more important to know whether I can claim the right to preserve myself in this flood of death that has carried off so many like me, muffling them and bearing them down and down, minds untried and sinews useless—so much debris. It is appropriate to ask whether I have any business withholding myself from the same fate.”
“And the answer?”
“I recall Spinoza’s having written that no virtue could be considered greater than that of trying to preserve oneself.”
“At all costs, oneself?”
“You don’t get it. Oneself. He didn’t say one’s life. He said oneself. You see the difference?”
“No.”
“He knew that everyone must die. He does not instruct us to graft new glands or to eat carp’s intestine in order to live three hundred years. We cannot make ourselves immortal. We can decide only what is for us to decide. The rest is beyond our power. In short, he did not mean preservation of the animal.”
“He was speaking of the soul, the spirit?”
“The mind. Anyway, the self that we must govern. Chance must not govern it, incident must not govern it. It is our humanity that we are responsible for it, our dignity, our freedom. Now, in a case like mine, I can’t ask to be immune from the war. I have to take my risks for survival as I did, formerly, against childhood diseases and all the dangers and accidents through which I nevertheless managed to become Joseph. Do you follow that?”
; “It’s impossible, every bit of it.”
“We are afraid to govern ourselves. Of course. It is so hard. We soon want to give up our freedom. It is not even real freedom, because it is not accompanied by comprehension. It is only a preliminary condition of freedom. But we hate it. And soon we run out, we choose a master, roll over on our backs and ask for the leash.”
“Ah,” said Tu As Raison Aussi.
“That’s what happens. It isn’t love that gives us weariness of life. It’s our inability to be free.”
“And you’re afraid it may happen to you?”
“I am.”
“Ideally, how would you like to regard the war, then?”
“I would like to see it as an incident.”
“Only an incident?”
“A very important one; perhaps the most important that has ever occurred. But, still, an incident. Is the real nature of the world changed by it? No. Will it decide, ultimately, the major issues of existence? No. Will it rescue us spiritually? Still no. Will it set us free in the crudest sense, that is, merely to be allowed to breathe and eat? I hope so, but I can’t be sure that it will. In no essential way is it crucial—if you accept my meaning of essential. Suppose I had a complete vision of life. I would not then be affected essentially. The war can destroy me physically. That it can do. But so can bacteria. I must be concerned with them, naturally. I must take account of them. They can obliterate me. But as long as I am alive, I must follow my destiny in spite of them.”
“Then only one question remains.”
“What?”
“Whether you have a separate destiny. Oh, you’re a shrewd wiggler,” said Tu As Raison Aussi. “But I’ve been waiting for you to cross my corner. Well, what do you say?”
I think I must have grown pale.
“I’m not ready to answer. I have nothing to say to that now.”
“How seriously you take this,” cried Tu As Ration Aussi. “It’s only a discussion. The boy’s teeth are chattering. Do you have a chill?” He ran to get a blanket from the bed.
I said faintly, “I’m all right.” He tucked the blanket round me and, in great concern, wiped my forehead and sat by me until nightfall.