by Saul Bellow
Sophie Geratis, my friend of hotel-organizer days, was married now but wanted to divorce her husband and marry me. She told me he had a vice with other men and didn’t pay attention to her at all. He gave her charge accounts and a car but he wanted her only as window dressing. His business was to sell a product to greenhouses, and this certain product was a monopoly, so his life was easy and he was chauffeured every day in his homburg hat and gloves around the hothouse belt of the city. Therefore Sophie spent a lot of time with me, fixing up my room at Owens’ as it had never been fixed up before. She wondered that I would sleep on a pillow without a pillowcase, and she brought over several. “You’re stingy,” she told me. “You’re not just sloppy, you appreciate good things.” She was right. Sophie was very intelligent, never mind that she had been a chambermaid. About some things I was tight. When I went into a good bar or club I would feel my pocket and worry about the check. Naturally she knew this. “But also I know that you give your dough away if somebody touches you the right way. That’s not good either. And there’s that car of yours, but that’s just plain dumbness. You were a knucklehead to buy it.”
With her floating wide gaze, brown and slow, Sophie was very pretty. In addition to which, as I’ve said, she had gifts of the mind, though she was inclined to use them in a scornful way. She wouldn’t use the fancy charge accounts her husband gave her. Wearing a hat of Polish flowers she had bought at Goldblatt’s she would wash her things in my sink. She was in her slip and smoked a cigarette. The paradoxical part is that she was a very tender person, she was good to me, and not just because she needed me but somehow just the reverse, because I needed her. However, I wasn’t prepared to marry.
“We’d get along fine if I fitted in more with your ambitions,” she said. “I’m all right for bed, but not to marry. When that other girl came to fetch you, you dropped me in a second. You probably would be ashamed of me. You have the most use for me when you’re feeling weak or low. I know you. Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard.”
“I doubt it. My brother says he drove a truck for a laundry on Marshfield. I never thought that he was a hotshot. Besides, he found my mother working in a Wells Street loft.”
“You don’t really want me, do you?”
Well, she meant why wasn’t I going to set my feet on a path of life and stop looking over the field. Why, there was nothing that I longed for more than that. Let it come! Let there be consummation, and superfluity be finished from the next drop of the pendulum onward! Let the necessity for the mystical great things of life, which, not satisfied, lives in us as the father of secret miseries, be fulfilled and have a chance to show it’s not the devil himself. Did Sophie think I didn’t want to have a wife, and sons and daughters, or be busy at my appropriate daily work? I stood up then and there and told her how entirely wrong she was about me.
“What are we waiting for?” she said, glad. “Let’s start! I’ll be a good wife to you, you know I will. I need to begin too.”
Then I got red and embarrassed, and my tongue wouldn’t move.
“See?” she said with sad frankness and wide, shadowed, rouged mouth while the electric light shone down on her clear bare shoulders. “I ain’t good enough. Well, who is?”
I wasn’t marrying just yet, that was what I said. But what Sophie had to tell me was what my Cossack pal also had meant, that time he hurt my pride. What he had really meant to say to me, as I sensed infallibly and right off, was that I couldn’t be hurt enough by the fate of other people. He should have known, as he himself was wandering from here to there, and what should he be kicking around for, from Moscow to Turkestan, to Arabia, to Paris, Singapore? Nobody gets out of these pains like a pilgrim, looking at temples and docks and smoking cigarettes past the bone heaps of history and over many times digested soil, there where people stayed at home and caught it in the neck.
So Sophie’s face, which was maturer now than the pretty face in the union office that I had first seen, was hurt. But she didn’t quit me this time as when, after Thea knocked at the door, she suddenly had covered the backs of her thighs. By now she knew, I reckon, how much disappointment is in the taste of existence. But I didn’t wish to marry her. She would have scolded me for my own good too much, I thought. So this one more soul I would fly by, that wanted something from me.
“You’re waiting for that girl,” she said with envy, wrongly.
I said, “No, I’ll never see her again.”
Nevertheless I was getting somewhere, you mustn’t go entirely by appearances. I was coming to some particularly important conclusions. In fact I was lying on my couch in the state of grand summary one afternoon, still in my bathrobe and having called off all duties in the inspiration of the day, when Clem Tambow arrived, full of an idea of his own.
I don’t believe Clem had many of the vices that lead to damnation, but such as they were they were very evident on this occasion—late rising, puffiness, double-breasted slovenliness of the kind that old gentleman La Bruyère thought so sordid, tobacco stink, lint, and cat hairs on him, kept up by dime-store purchase and cheap accommodation, as in aftershave lotion, Sta-comb, artificial silk socks, and so forth, besides his lordly self-abuse look. Be that as it might, he had been lying in bed too this solemn brown Chicago day and working also on a scheme.
He was going out into professional life. As soon as he got his psychology degree in the winter he aimed to get an office in one of the older skyscrapers on Dearborn near Jackson and set up as a vocational-guidance counselor.
“You?” I said. “You never did a day’s work in your life!”
“That’s what makes me so ideal,” he answered, ready for me. “I’m relaxed. No bunk, Augie. You remember Benny Fry from the poolroom? He’s cleaning up. He does marriage counseling too, and gives rabbit tests.”
“If it’s the same guy I’m thinking of, the one who wore the elevator shoes, didn’t they have him in court last month for a phony?”
“Yes, but we can do the same thing legitimately.”
“I don’t want to throw cold water,” I said, still full of my own experience. “But how will you get clients?”
“Oh, that’s no problem. Do people seem to you to know what they want? They beg you to tell them. So we’ll be the experts they come to.”
“Oh no, Clem. Not ‘we.’”
“Augie, I want you to come into this with me. I don’t like to go into things by myself. I’ll give the aptitude tests and you do the interviews. With the new Rogers nondirective technique you let them do the talking anyway. There’s nothing to it. Listen here, you can’t go on from one screwball job to another.”
“I know, but Clem, something has just happened to me today.”
“You’re just being stubborn again,” he said. “We can clean up in this racket.”
“No, Clem. What could I do for these guys or women? I’d be ashamed to take their dough in this kind of an employment bureau.”
“Oh, bushwah! You don’t send guys out on jobs, you tell them what they’re good for. This is modern activity. Modern activity is entirely different.”
“Stop arguing,” I said severely. “Can’t you see something has happened to me too today?” Then he saw that I really was moved. I made a lengthy declaration, which I remember went somewhat as follows:
“I have a feeling,” I said, “about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said ‘no’ like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders, just on the obstinacy of my memory of these lines, never entirely clear. But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When striving stops, there they are as a gift. I was lying on the couch here before and they suddenly went quivering right straight through me. Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion, chat
ter, distraction, effort, superfluity, passed off like something unreal. And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quiet and wait it out. The ambition of something special and outstanding I have always had is only a boast that distorts this knowledge from its origin, which is the oldest knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges. At any time life can come together again and man be regenerated, and doesn’t have to be a god or public servant like Osiris who gets torn apart annually for the sake of the common prosperity, but the man himself, finite and taped as he is, can still come where the axial lines are. He will be brought into focus. He will live with true joy. Even his pains will be joy if they are true, even his helplessness will not take away his power, even wandering will not take him away from himself, even the big social jokes and hoaxes need not make him ridiculous, even disappointment after disappointment need not take away his love. Death will not be terrible to him if life is not. The embrace of other true people will take away his dread of fast change and short life. And this is not imaginary stuff, Clem, because I bring my entire life to the test.”
“You really are a persistent and obstinate type of a guy,” said Clem.
“I thought if I knew more my problem would be simplified, and maybe I should complete my formal education. But since I’ve been working for Robey I have reached the conclusion that I couldn’t utilize even ten per cent of what I already knew. I’ll give you an example. I read about King Arthur’s Round Table when I was a kid, but what am I ever going to do about it? My heart was touched by sacrifice and pure attempts, so what should I do? Or take the Gospels. How are you supposed to put them to use? Why, they’re not utilizable! And then you go and pile on top of that more advice and information. Anything that just adds information that you can’t use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there’s too much of everything of this kind, that’s come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me? I haven’t got that much head to master it all. I get carried away. It doesn’t give my feelings enough of a chance if I have to store up and become like an encyclopedia. Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spend forty, fifty, sixty years like that inside the walls of his own being. And all great experience would only take place within the walls of his being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, monstrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would be only a terrible, hideous dream about existing. It’s better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls.”
“Well, come on, what are you trying to prove?”
“I don’t want to prove a single thing, not a thing. Do you think I have this kind of ambition to stand out and prove something? Almost everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labor you put into it. But it doesn’t take hard labor. Or at least shouldn’t. You don’t do that. The world is held for you. So I don’t want to be representative or exemplary or head of my generation or any model of manhood. All I want is something of my own, and bethink myself. This is why I’m sounding off now and am so excited. I want a place of my own. If it was on Greenland’s icy mountain, I’d take and go to Greenland, and I’d never loan myself again to any other guy’s scheme.”
“So tell me before I die from impatience, what’s this deal of yours?”
“I aim to get myself a piece of property and settle down on it. Right here in Illinois would suit me fine, though I wouldn’t object to Indiana or Wisconsin. Don’t worry, I’m not thinking about becoming a farmer, though I might do a little farming, but what I’d like most is to get married and set up a kind of home and teach school. I’ll marry—of course my wife would have to agree with me about this—and then I’d get my mother out of the blind-home and my brother George up from the South. I think Simon might give me some dough to get a start. Oh, I don’t expect to set up the Happy Isles. I don’t consider myself any Prospero. I haven’t got the build. I have no daughter. I never was a king, for instance. No, no, I’m not looking for any Pindar Hyperborean dwelling with the gods in ease a tearless life, never aging—”
“This is the most fantastic thing I ever heard come out of you yet. It’s a scheme worthy of your mind. It makes me proud of you, kind of, though I’m also appalled when I think of the things you must think about when you look so calm and restful. But where are you going to get the kids for your school?”
“I thought maybe I could get accredited with the state or county, or whoever does it, as a foster-parent, and get kids from institutions. This way the board and keep would be taken care of, and we’d have these kids.”
“Plus children of your own?”
“Of course. I’d love to have my own little children. I long for little children. And these kids from institutions who have had it rough—”
“And who might turn out to be little John Dillingers or Basil Bangharts or Tommy O’Connors. But I know what you’re hoping. You think you’ll love them so they’ll turn into little Michelangelos and Tolstois, and you’ll give them their chance in life and rescue them, so you’ll be their saint and holy father. But if you make them so good, how will they get along in the world? They’ll have to pass their whole life all alone.”
“No, really, I could live with them. I’d be very happy. I’d fix up a shop for woodwork. Maybe I’d even learn how to repair my own car. My brother George could be the shoemaking instructor. Maybe I’d study languages so I could teach them. My mother could sit on the porch and the animals would come around her, by her shoes, the roosters and the cats. Maybe we could start a tree nursery.”
“You do too want to be a king,” said Clem. “You sonofabitch, you want to be the kind goddam king over these women and children and your half-wit brother. Your father ditched the family, and you did your share of ditching too, so now you want to make up for it.”
“You can always find bad motives,” I said. “There are always bad motives. So all I can say is I don’t want to have them. I don’t know about my unfortunate father—he seems to have done as most others, get in and then take off. Seemingly for liberty. Most likely for other trouble or suffering. But why should I want to cheat on a thing like this, when I’m looking for something lasting and durable and trying to get where those axial lines are? I realize this may not sound like such a great scheme to many people. But I know I can’t have much of a chance to beat life at its greatest complication and meshuggah power, so I want to start in lower down, and simpler.”
“I wish you luck,” he said. “But I don’t think it ever can happen.”
Well, now I had this sterling idea, my project. I was at the turning point. For a while I thought seriously that I might marry Sophie but that was in my hurry to make a start. When all of a sudden—wham! the war broke out on that terrible Sunday afternoon, and then there was nothing but war that you could think about. I got carried away immediately. Overnight I had no personal notions at all. Where had they gone to? They were on the bottom somewhere. It was just the war I cared about and I was on fire. How much are you required to care when such an event comes? Me, I cared like anything. At first I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn’t wait to go and fight. I was a madman in the movies and yelled and clapped in the newsreel. Well, what you terribly need you take when you get the chance, I reckon. After a while, if I thought of my great idea, I told myself that after the war I’d get a real start, but I couldn’t do it while the whole earth was busy in this hell-making project, or man-eating Saturns were picking guys up left and right around me. I went around and made
a speech to my pals, much to the amazement of people, about the universal ant heap the enemy would establish if they won, a fate nobody could escape then, mankind under one star of government, a human desert rolling up to monster pyramids of power. A few centuries after, and on this same earth’s surface, under the same sun and moon, where there once had been men like gods there would be nothing but this bug-humanity that would make itself as weird as the threatening universe outside and would imitate it by creating human mechanical regularity as invariable as physical laws. Obedience would be God, and freedom the Devil. There wouldn’t any new Moses arise to lead an exodus, because amidst the new pyramids there wouldn’t any new Moses be bred. Oh yes, I got up on my hindlegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone.
Then I went to volunteer, but it turned out that Bizcocho had ruptured me. The Army and Navy doctors had me cough for them and agreed that I had inguinal hernia. They recommended that I be operated on, which was free of charge.