Dangling Man

by Saul Bellow

  “You’re the one that’s shouting now, Captain,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me how to talk,” the Captain exploded.

  “I’m not your subordinate. I’m a civilian. I don’t have to take this from you.”

  “By Jesus, I’ll take a swing at you in about a minute!”

  “Try it!” I said, stepping back and tightening my fists.

  “Howard, please. Howard,” said Mrs. Briggs.

  “Joseph,” said Iva, appearing in the doorway. “Come here. Come into the room.” I edged by them, guardedly. “Get in,” commanded Iva.

  “If he touched me, I’d murder him, soldier suit or no soldier suit,” I growled as I went in.

  “Oh, keep quiet,” said Iva. “Mrs. Briggs, please, just a moment.” She hurried toward them.

  I put on my shoes, snatched my street clothes from the closet, and flung out of the house. I walked rapidly through the drizzle. It was not late, certainly not more than ten o’clock. The air was dense and black and pressed close on the hourglass figures the street lamps made. I could not have slowed my walk; I was not sure of my legs. So I went on for some time, until I came to an open place, a lot with a wire backstop for baseball games. The ground was flooded, a wind-blown sheet of water, utterly dark. Behind the backstop was a white drinking fountain and water from it flurring into the warm air. I drank and then I went on, not so fast as before but just as aimlessly, toward the static shower of lights in the street ahead, a spray of them hanging in the middle distance over the shine of the pavement. Then I turned back.

  I could not even imagine what Iva’s misery must be, nor the state of the house. Iva must be trying to explain; Mrs. Briggs, if she was listening at all, was listening frostily; while Vanaker was making his way to his room, meek but vindicated, and probably wondering what had happened. Once more he seemed to me, as in the early days, simple-minded, perhaps subnormal.

  I walked over the cinders of a schoolyard and came into an alley approaching our windows. I looked for Iva’s shadow on the blind. She was not there. I had halted near a fence against which a tree leaned, freshly budding and seething under the rain. I made an effort to dry my face. Then it occurred to me that the reason I could not see her was that she was lying on the bed again. My skin was suddenly as wet with perspiration as it had been a moment ago with rain. I turned and started back along the schoolyard fence. A steel ring on a rope whipped loudly against the flagpole. Then, for a moment, a car caught me in its lights. I stood aside for it and followed its red blur. It was gone. Something ran among the cans and papers. A rat, I thought and, sickened, I went even more quickly, skirting a pool at the foot of the street where a torn umbrella lay slogged in water and ashes. I took a deep breath of warm air.

  I believe I had known for some time that the moment I had been waiting for had come, and that it was impossible to resist any longer. I must give myself up. And I recognized that the breath of warm air was simultaneously a breath of relief at my decision to surrender. I was done. But it was not painful to acknowledge that, it was not painful in the least. Not even when I tested myself, whispering “the leash,” reproachfully, did I feel pained or humiliated. I could have chosen a harsher symbol than that for my surrender. It would not have hurt me, for I could feel nothing but gratification and a desire to make my decision effective at once.

  It couldn’t be later than half-past ten now. The draft board often held late sessions. I set out for its office in the Sevier Hotel. As I was walking across the old-fashioned lobby, trying to remember on which side the office was, the clerk called me over. He guessed what I wanted.

  “If it’s the board you’re after,” he said, “everybody’s gone home.”

  “Can I leave a note? Oh, never mind, I’ll mail it.”

  I sat down at a desk in a corner, near one of the portieres, and wrote on a sheet of stationery:

  “I hereby request to be taken at

  the earliest possible moment into

  the armed services.”

  To this I added my full name and call number, and across the bottom:

  “I am available at any time.”

  After I had posted this, I stopped at a tavern and spent my last forty cents on a drink.

  “I’m off to the wars,” I said to the bartender. His hand hovered over the money. He picked it up and turned to the cash register. The place, after all, was full of soldiers and sailors.

  March 27

  This morning I told Iva what I had done. She made only one comment, namely, that I should have consulted her. But I said, “I’m doing myself no good here.” There was no answer to that. She took the check downtown to cash. I waited for her on the library steps, sitting among the pigeons, reading the paper. She came down at noon, and we had lunch together. She did not look well. There was a blemish on her face that always shows up when she is disturbed. I felt weak myself, standing in the sunlight.

  Mrs. Briggs had asked both parties to yesterday’s disgrace to move.

  “You can stay on alone,” I said to Iva. “She won’t object.”

  “I’ll see about it. When do you think you’ll be called?”

  “I’m not sure. I think in about a week.”

  “I don’t think you ought to spend your last week moving,” she said. “Well stay on for a while. I’m sure Mrs. Briggs will let us.”

  About her own plans she said nothing.

  March 29

  Mrs. Kiefer died during the night. When I went out to breakfast I saw her door thrown open, her bed empty, the curtains in the room pinned back, the window open. Later, Mrs. Briggs appeared in black. In the afternoon other mourners came, gathering in the parlor. At five o’clock they began to pour out of the house. They went up the still street to the undertaker. The odor of coffee drifted up from the kitchen.

  That evening, as we came out of the restaurant, we saw Mrs. Bartlett across the way. She had changed her white uniform for a silk dress and a short fur coat. Her hat was a strange affair with a flat top and a curtain or wimple that fell about her neck—a fashion that disappeared many years ago. We guessed that she was on her way to the movies after her long confinement with Mrs. Kiefer. Her shiny, long, black pocketbook was clasped under her doubled arm; she walked in a heavy-hipped, energetic stride toward the brightly lit avenue.

  March 31

  Today, the funeral. The Captain drove up with a wreath in his car; to him came a woman in a blue cape and feathers and short legs in ribbed hose. Her foot was set on the running board as though she were standing at a bar. Then she sprang in, and they drove off together. Telegraph messengers kept coming all morning. I don’t know how many children the old woman had. There was a son in California, Marie had once said. The family gathered on the porch. The women’s faces were mottled with crying; the men looked morose. They returned from the funeral at noon and had lunch at a long table in the parlor. I saw them when I went down for the midday mail. The Captain caught me looking in, and frowned. I withdrew quickly.

  The postman was putting a letter in the box next door and he pointed vigorously at me and drew his finger across his throat. I had received my notice. “A committee of your neighbors. …” I was summoned for the ninth. My blood test was to be on Monday. I took the papers out of the envelope and propped them up on the dresser where Iva could see them when she came in.

  Later in the day, as I sat reading, Marie came to the door with fresh towels. She, too, was dressed in black. She went about the house somber and unapproachable, as though she shared with Mrs. Kiefer and the mourners some unusual secret about death. I took this opportunity to tell her that I was going away.

  “Your wife going to stay?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, good luck.” She gloomily wiped her cheeks with a black-edged handkerchief.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She took the soiled towels and shut the door.

  April 2

  Universal relief. As old Almstadt put it, since I had to go, i
t was better to go and get it over with. And my father, too, said, “Well, at least you don’t have to wait any more.” Amos, when I spoke to him yesterday, asked me to have lunch with him at his club. I told him I was going to be busy. I know he would have introduced me to his friends as “my brother who is going into the Army,” and would thereafter be known as a man who was “in it.”

  April 4

  Vanaker moved this morning. I heard Marie in his room after he had gone and went in. She had found two empty perfume bottles in his wastebasket. I was right. He left an interesting lot of goods behind, lying in the stale closet. Bottles, of course—those he had not seen fit, for some reason, to throw into the yard—picture magazines with photos of nudes, gloves, soiled underwear, the bowl of a pipe, a grease-stained handkerchief, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress and a school edition of One Hundred Great Narrative Poems, a carton of matches, a felt hat, a necktie with some matter dried into it. The whole collection went into a box which Marie carried down to the basement.

  Spent several hours putting my things away in the trunk.

  April 5

  While it was still dark, I left the house this morning to go for my blood test. I had not been out so early for many months. The cars were jammed with factory workers. When I asked the conductor about my destination, a small park which I had never heard of, he said, “Stick around, I’ll fix you up.” We plunged up the broad street for a mile or two, and then he nudged me and said, “Here y’are; comin’ up.” And with a sort of playfulness he pushed me toward the door, while the others looked on gloomily, sleepy and dark-faced.

  I waited in line at the field house, under the thin trees. In the gymnasium I took off my clothes, marched naked around the floor with the others, examining their scars and blemishes as they did mine. There were few boys; most of the men were in their thirties. The cripples were swiftly weeded out. A doctor felt us in the groin; another, an aging man with a cigar, said perfunctorily, wielding the needle, “Clench your hand; open; that’s it.” Holding a swab to your arm, looking curiously at your blood in the tube, you filed out and were dismissed.

  It was eight o’clock, morning, full and brilliant; my usual hour for rising. I stopped at a cafeteria for breakfast, went home, and read all day.

  April 6

  Iva has put together a few things she thinks I’ll need in the Army—my razor, a few handkerchiefs, a fountain pen and a block of note paper, my shaving brush. I am not going to take the usual ten-day furlough. I would rather save the time and use it later, if that is possible. Iva, of course, thinks it a sign of coldness on my part. It is merely that I do not want any more delays. She is going back to the Almstadts’. Her father is coming on the tenth to move her things.

  April 8

  When I visited my father yesterday, I went upstairs to my old room. For a time after my marriage the maid had occupied it. It was unused now, and I found in it many of the objects I bad kept around me ten years ago, before I left for school. There was a Persian print over the bed, of a woman dropping a flower on her interred lover—visible in his burial gown under the stones; a bookcase my mother had bought me; a crude water color of a pitcher and glass done by Bertha, some nearly forgotten girl. I sat in the rocking chair, feeling that my life was already long enough to contain nearly forgotten periods, a loose group of undifferentiated years. Recently, I had begun to feel old, and it occurred to me that I might be concerned with age merely because I might never attain any great age, and that there might be a mechanism in us that tried to give us all of life when there was danger of being cut off. And while I knew it was absurd for me to think of my “age,” I had apparently come to a point where the perspectives of time appeared far more contracted than they had a short while ago. I was beginning to grasp the meaning of “irretrievable.” This rather ordinary and, in some ways mean, room, had for twelve years been a standard site, the bearded Persian under the round stones and the water color, fixtures of my youth. Ten years ago I was at school; and before that. … It was suddenly given me to experience one of those consummating glimpses that come to all of us periodically. The room, delusively, dwindled and became a tiny square, swiftly drawn back, myself and all the objects in it growing smaller. This was not a mere visual trick. I understood it to be a revelation of the ephemeral agreements by which we live and pace ourselves. I looked around at the restored walls. This place which I avoided ordinarily, had great personal significance for me. But it was not here thirty years ago. Birds flew through this space. It may be gone fifty years hence. Such reality, I thought, is actually very dangerous, very treacherous. It should not be trusted. And I rose rather unsteadily from the rocker, feeling that there was an element of treason to common sense in the very objects of common sense. Or that there was no trusting them, save through wide agreement, and that my separation from such agreement had brought me perilously far from the necessary trust, auxiliary to all sanity. I had not done well alone. I doubted whether anyone could. To be pushed upon oneself entirely put the very facts of simple existence in doubt. Perhaps the war could teach me, by violence, what I had been unable to learn during those months in the room. Perhaps I could sound creation through other means. Perhaps. But things were now out of my hands. The next move was the world’s. I could not bring myself to regret it.

  Amos and Dolly and Etta and Iva were at the table when I came in to dinner. My father presented me with a watch. Amos gave me a suitcase which, he said, would be handy for overnight trips when I came back. From Etta and Dolly I got a leather sewing kit, complete with scissors and buttons.

  April 9

  This is my last civilian day. Iva has packed my things. It is plain that she would like to see me show a little more grief at leaving. For her sake, I would like to. And I am sorry to leave her, but I am not at all sorry to part with the rest of it. I am no longer to be held accountable for myself; I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom canceled.

  Hurray for regular hours!

  And for the supervision of the spirit!

  Long live regimentation!

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  First published in the United States of America by The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1944

  Published in Penguin Books 1988

  This edition published in Penguin Books 1996

  Published with an Introduction in Penguin Modern Classics 2007

  Copyright © Saul Bellow. 1944

  Copyright renewed © Saul Bellow, 1971

  Introduction copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2007
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  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the introducer has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-141-38930-1