by Saul Bellow
“It’s hard to find apartments in this section of Paris near the Champs Elysées. Besides we’re not at home much, either of us. But I aim to get a villa out at St. Cloud if we have to settle here.”
“If you have to? You sound as if you didn’t want to.”
“Oh—it’s all the same to me where I live.”
Of all places, we were in the Petit Palais at a picture exhibition from the Pinacothek of Munich. These grand masterpieces were sitting on the walls. Du Niveau was along, massive, in his red suede coat and highly polished pointy shoes. Simon and he admired each other’s clothes. Stella and Charlotte were wearing mink stoles, Simon a double-breasted plaid and crocodile shoes, and I a camel’s-hair coat, so that we looked appropriately gorgeous to pass in one of those Italian portrait crowds of gold and jewels.
Du Niveau said, “I love pictures, but I can’t stand religious subjects.”
Nobody was thinking much about painting, unless it was Stella who sometimes paints. I can’t explain how come we were there. Maybe nothing better was open just then.
Simon and I dropped behind for a while and I asked him, “Whatever happened to Renée?”
A heavy red color crowded his blond face—he had become very stout. He said, “Why do you have to ask me here, for the love of God!”
“We can talk, Simon. They won’t overhear anything. Did she have a kid?”
“No, no, it was just a bluff. There wasn’t any kid.”
“But you said—”
“Never mind what I said. You asked me, and I’m telling you.”
I didn’t know whether or not to believe him, he was in such a rush to get rid of the subject. And how touchy he was! He didn’t want to be talked about.
But at lunch, when Stella and du Niveau had gone back to the studio, Charlotte opened up. She was sitting upright in her mink and in a velour hat which suited her face because she has a very downy skin which was covered with high color. Evidently Simon’s trouble with Renée had been all over the Chicago papers, and she took it for granted that I had read about it. No, I hadn’t heard a thing. I was completely surprised. Simon kept his mouth shut during this, and perhaps it tormented him that I might add something which Charlotte didn’t happen to know. Not me; I was silent too and didn’t ask any questions. Renée had sued him and made a scandal. She claimed she had a child by him. She might have accused three other men, said Charlotte, and Charlotte knew what she was talking about you can be sure; she was a well-informed woman. If the case hadn’t been thrown out of court right away she was ready with plenty of evidence. “I’d have given her a case!” she said. “The little whore!” Simon wasn’t having anything to do with either of us during this conversation. He sat at the table but, as it were, we didn’t have his company. “Every minute she was with him she was collecting evidence,” said Charlotte. “They never stopped at a place but what she didn’t take a pack of matches and write the date inside. She even had his cigar butts for evidence. And all the time it was supposed to be love. What did she love you for?” said Charlotte with a terrible sudden outburst. “Your fat belly? Your scar on your forehead? Your bald spot? It was the money. It never was anything except money.” I wanted to duck as this came down; my shoulders flinched. Down it burned and beat on us. Simon nevertheless didn’t seem much disturbed, only thoughtful, and continued drawing at his cigar. At no time did he answer anything. Maybe he thought that as he himself had wanted money he couldn’t condemn Renée for wanting it, but he didn’t say.
“Then she’d phone me and say, ‘You can’t have children, you should let him go, he wants a family’ ‘Go on, take him away if you can,’ I said to her. ‘You know you can’t get him because you’re nothing but a little tramp. You and he are both no good.’ But she got out a summons for him, and when they tried to serve it I phoned him and told him he’d better get out of town. He wouldn’t leave without me. ‘What’ve you got to be afraid of?’ I said. ‘It isn’t your kid. It’s three other guys’.’ I happened to have the flu then and was supposed to stay in bed, but when he wouldn’t leave alone I had to come to the airport to meet him, and it was a rainstorm. Finally we took off, and we had to make an emergency landing in Nebraska. And he said, ‘I might as well get knocked off. I’ve wasted my life anyhow.’ And what did I do, if he wasted his life? What was I there for? What was in it for me? As soon as it got bad he came running to me for protection, and I protected him. If he didn’t have such an abnormal idea about being happy in the first place it wouldn’t have happened. Who told him he had any business to expect all that? What right has anybody? There is no such right,” she said.
In the back the musicians were smoothing their bows away over their instruments.
“Now she’s married. She married one of those guys and disappeared with him somewhere …”
I wanted Charlotte to stop. It now was too much, flying in the rainstorm and about wasted lives, while he looked more and more indifferent, which he could do only by making himself abstract like this. I started to cough. I had a long coughing fit. Shall I explain why? Because many years ago when I was a kid and went to have my tonsils out I began to cry when the ether mask was put on me. A nurse said, “Is he crying, a big boy like that?” And another answered, “Why, no, he’s brave. He’s not crying, he’s coughing.” And when I heard that I started to cough in earnest. This is the kind of coughing it was, of great distress. It stopped the conversation. The maître d’hôtel came to see what was the matter and gave me a glass of water.
Lord! How much of this did Simon have to hear? If she didn’t stop she’d turn him into stone. He’d have turned into stone long ago if it hadn’t been for these Renées. What are you supposed to do, lay down your life? That’s what she wanted from him and what she meant by “right.” Sheer murder. If she meant that you have to die anyway and might as well do it sooner than later, it’s criminal murder.
He was ashamed, stony with shame. His secrets were being told. His secrets! What did they amount to? You’d think they were as towering as the Himalayas. But all they were about was his mismanaged effort to live. To live and not die. And this was what he had to be ashamed of.
“You’d better do something for that cold,” said Charlotte severely.
I love my brother very much. I never meet him again without the utmost love filling me up. He has it too, though we both seem to fight it.
“It sounds like the old whooping cough you used to have,” Simon said and looked toward me once again.
Just then I thought that the worst of it for him was not to have the child.
I couldn’t spend much time with Simon in Paris. Mintouchian cabled me to go to Bruges and look up a guy there who had a big nylon deal on his mind, and so I started out. I had Jacqueline the maid with me as passenger. She has folks in Normandy and was going to pay them a Christmas visit, and as she was bringing a couple of suitcases full of presents I gave her a lift.
Jacqueline was referred to Stella by du Niveau. When he first knew her she was a waitress in Vichy just after the French defeat and he was on his way out of the country. They must have become friends, and it is hard to conceive because she looks so grotesque. Though this was some time back and then she might have been seeing the last of her best days. At the outer corners Jacqueline’s eyes sink down queerly. She has a large, crooked Norman nose, fair hair not in very good health, veiny temples, a long chin and a disciplinarian mouth that lipstick doesn’t do a great deal to change. She is highly painted and has a sweet odor of cosmetics and cleaning fluid. Her manner is very busy. She pounds the floor very rapidly and hard as she walks, but she is a person of sweet temper, though gossipy and with all kinds of incomprehensible social ambitions. In addition to doing housework she also is employed as an ouvreuse, or usherette, in a movie, which is more of du Niveau’s influence. Therefore she has a lot of social history to relate of the movie and the tough night life after closing time when she stops at the Coupole for a cup of coffee. She is always being offered violence, like hold
up and rape, Arabs hitting her or trying to force their way into her room at night. Her hips are big and legs varicose for all that she moves so briskly, and this with her sharp face and breasts that have gone out of shape; and yet what is it that dismisses a person from desirability? I’m not the one to say. She has unkillable pride in her sensuality and adventurous spirit, and if she has these outrageous colors and parrot bite, what about it?
It was a big holiday deal when we started out. She removed some stains from my camel’s-hair coat with tea, which she claimed was just the thing, and then I carried her jammed cardboard valises with their tin locks down and stowed them in the trunk of the Citroën.
It was cold; a hard cold with snowflakes. We circled the Etoile and roared off toward Rouen. I should have gone by way of Amiens, but it wasn’t too much of a detour for her sake. She’s a kind, grateful, and by and large docile woman. So we went at this hungry speed through Rouen and then bore north toward the channel. She was telling of Vichy in the good old days and of the celebrities she knew there. It was her cunning way of getting the conversation round to du Niveau, for she never missed a chance to discuss him with me, and what she really wanted was to warn me to be on guard, that he was unscrupulous. Not that she wasn’t grateful, you understand, but she also was beholden to me and she hinted at various crimes he was guilty of. I realized that she was simply romancing about him. He represented some great ideal to her which her spirit was hungry for.
We were getting close to her destination, and I wasn’t too sorry, even though it was a sad, dark day and I’d have to continue to Bruges alone. The ride by way of Dunkerque and Ostend is a terribly melancholy one through ruins and along the grim Channel water.
Only a few kilometers from her uncle’s farm the Citroën’s engine began to miss and finally we stalled. I picked up the hood, but a lot I know about motors. Besides, it was freezing. So we started to walk toward the farm across the fields. She was going to send her nephew to town for a mechanic when we got there. But we had a good long way to hike, three or four miles across the fields, which were brown, turfy and stiff, these fields where battles of the Hundred Years’ War had been fought, where the bones of the killed English were bleached and sent back to be buried in churches, where wolves and crows had cleaned up. The cold, after a time, made you gasp. The tears were cutting tracks over Jacqueline’s face, which was flaming through the make-up. I was stung and numb too, hand and foot.
“Our stomachs may freeze,” she said to me after we had gone about a mile. “It is very dangerous.”
“Stomach? How can the stomach freeze?”
“It can. You can be ailing for life if that happens.”
“What do you do to prevent it?” I said.
“The thing to do is sing,” she said, desperate in her thin Paris shoes and trying to stretch her cotton muffler over the back of her head. And she started singing some night-club song. The cold blackbirds flapped out of the woods of rusty oaks and even they must have been too cold for noise because I heard no grating from them. Only Jacqueline’s poor voice which didn’t appear to get far over the thin snowy pockets and furrows. “You must absolutely try to sing,” she said. “Otherwise you can never be sure. Something may happen.” And because I didn’t want to argue with her about medical superstitions and be so right or superior wising her up about modern science I decided, finally, what the hell! I might as well sing too. The only thing I could think to sing was “La Cucaracha.” I kept up La Cucaracha for a mile or two and felt more chilled than helped. Then she said, after we had both worn ourselves out trying to breathe in the harsh wind and keep up the song cure, “That wasn’t French that you were singing, was it?”
I said it was a Mexican song.
At which she exclaimed, “Ah, the dream of my life is to go to Mexico!”
The dream of her life? What, not Saigon? Not Hollywood? Not Bogotá? Not Aleppo? I gave a double-take at her water-sparkling eyes and freezing, wavering, mascara-lined, goblin, earnest and disciplinarian, membranous, and yet gorgeous face, with its fairy soot of pink and that red snare of her mouth; yet feminine; yet mischievous; yet still hopefully and obstinately seductive. What would she be doing in Mexico? I tried to picture her there. How queer it was! I started to laugh loudly. And what was I doing here in the fields of Normandy? How about that?
“Have you thought of something funny, M’sieu March?” she said as she hurried with me, swinging her arms in her short jacket of leg-of-mutton sleeves.
“Very funny!”
Then she pointed. “Vous voyez les chiens?” The dogs of the farm had leaped a brook and were dashing for us on the brown coat of the turf, yelling and yapping. “Don’t you worry about them,” she said, picking up a branch. “They know me well.” Sure enough they did. They bounded into the air and licked her face.
The trouble was with the spark plugs, which were soon repaired, and I cut out for Dunkerque and Ostend. Where the British were so punished the town is ruined. Quonset huts stand there on the ruins. The back of the ancient water was like wolf gray. Then on the long sand the waves crashed white; they spit themselves to pieces. I saw this specter of white anger coming from the savage gray and meanwhile shot northward, in a great hurry to get to Bruges and out of this line of white which was like eternity opening up right beside destructions of the modern world, hoary and grumbling. I thought if I could beat the dark to Bruges I’d see the green canals and ancient palaces. On a day like this I could use the comfort of it, when it was so raw. I was still chilled from the hike across the fields, but, thinking of Jacqueline and Mexico, I got to grinning again. That’s the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature, forever rising up. What’s so laughable, that a Jacqueline, for instance, as hard used as that by rough forces, will still refuse to lead a disappointed life? Or is the laugh at nature—including eternity—that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope? Nah, nah! I think. It never will. But that probably is the joke, on one or the other, and laughing is an enigma that includes both. Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.
By Saul Bellow
FICTION
Dangling Man (1944)
The Victim (1947)
The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Seize the Day (1956)
Henderson the Rain King (1959)
Herzog (1964)
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970)
Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
The Dean’s December (1976)
More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
A Theft (1989)
The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
Something to Remember Me By (1991)
The Actual (1997)
Ravelstein (2000)
SHORT STORIES
Mosby’s Memoirs (1969)
Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
Collected Stories (2001)
TRAVEL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
It All Adds Up (1994)
A fiction writer, essayist, playwright, lecturer, and memoirist, Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937 and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin before serving in the Marines during World War II. Later, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. Throughout his long and productive career, he contributed fiction to several magazines and quarterlies, including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Playboy, and Esquire, as well as criticism to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Leader, and others.
Universally recognized as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, Bellow has won more honors than almost any other American w
riter. Among these, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift and the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for "excellence in Jewish literature.” He was the first American to win the International Literary Prize, and remains the only novelist in history to have received three National Book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work." Saul Bellow died in 2005 at age 89.
The great novel of the American dream, of “the Universal eligibility to be noble,” Saul Bellow’s third book charts the picaresque journey of one schemer, chancer, romantic, and holy fool: Augie March. Awarded the National Book Award in 1953, The Adventures of Augie March remains one of the classics of American literature.
An impulsively active, irresistibly charming and resolutely free-spirited man, Augie March leaves his family of poor Jewish immigrants behind and sets off in search of reality, fulfillment, and most importantly, love. During his exultant quest, he latches on to a series of dubious schemes – from stealing books and smuggling immigrants to training a temperamental eagle to hunt lizards – and strong-minded women – from the fiery, eagle-owning Thea Fenchel, to the sneaky and alluring Stella. As Augie travels from the depths of poverty to the peaks of worldly success, he stands as an irresistible, poignant incarnation of the American idea of freedom. Written in the cascades of brilliant, biting, ravishing prose that would come to be known as “Bellovian,” The Adventures of Augie March re-wrote the language of Saul Bellow’s generation.