The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (77 page)

Like Alice after she had emptied the DRINK ME bottle in Wonderland, Peg was very tall; bony but delicate, she resembled a silent-movie star named Colleen Moore, a round-eyed ingenue with bangs. In her fourth month of pregnancy, Peg was still working at Filene’s, and Eddie, unwilling to get up in the morning to drive her to the station, spent long days in bed under the faded patchwork quilts. Pink, when it isn’t fresh and lively, can be a desperate color. The pink of Walish’s quilts sank my heart when I came looking for him. The cottage was paneled in walnut-stained boards, the rooms were sunless, the kitchen especially gloomy. I found him upstairs sleeping, his jaw undershot and his Jewish lip prominent. The impression he made was both brutal and innocent. In sleep he was bereft of the confidence into which he put so much effort. Not many of us are fully wakeful, but Walish took particular pride in being alert. That he was nobody’s fool was his main premise. But in sleep he didn’t look clever.

I got him up. He was embarrassed. He was not the complete bohemian after all. His muzziness late in the day distressed him, and he grumbled, putting his thin legs out of bed. We went to the kitchen and began to drink.

Peg insisted that he see a psychiatrist in Providence. He kept this from me awhile, finally admitting that he needed a tune-up, minor internal adjustments. Becoming a father rattled him. His wife eventually gave birth to male twins. The facts are trivial and I don’t feel that I’m betraying a trust. Besides, I owe him nothing. His letter upset me badly. What a time he chose to send it! Thirty-five years without a cross word. He allows me to count on his affection. Then he lets me have it. When do you shaft a pal, when do you hand him the poison cup? Not while he’s still young enough to recover. Walish waited till the very end—
my
_ end, of course.
He
_ is still youthful, he writes me. Evidence of this is that he takes a true interest in young lesbians out in Missouri, he alone knows their inmost hearts and they allow him to make love to them—Walish, the sole male exception. Like the explorer McGovern, who went to Lhasa in disguise, the only Westerner to penetrate the sacred precincts. They trust only youth, they trust him, so it’s certain that he can’t be old.

This document of his pulls me to pieces entirely. And I agree, objectively, that my character is not an outstanding success. I am inattentive, spiritually lazy, I tune out. I have tried to make this indolence of mine look good, he says. For example, I never would check a waiter’s arithmetic; I refused to make out my own tax returns; I was too “unworldly” to manage my own investments, and hired experts (read “crooks”). Realistic Walish wasn’t too good to fight over nickels; it was the principle that counted, as honor did with Shakespeare’s great soldiers. When credit cards began to be used, Walish, after computing interest and service charges to the fourth decimal, cut up Peg’s cards and threw them down the chute. Every year he fought it out with tax examiners, both federal and state. Nobody was going to get the better of Eddie Walish. By such hardness he connected himself with the skinflint rich—the founding Rockefeller, who wouldn’t tip more than a dime, or Getty the billionaire, in whose mansion weekend guests were forced to use coin telephones. Walish wasn’t being petty, he was being hard, strict, tighter than a frog’s ass. It wasn’t simply basic capitalism. Insofar as Walish was a Brecht fan, it was also Leninist or Stalinist hardness. And if I was, or appeared to be, misty about money, it was conceivably “a semi-unconscious strategy,” he said. Did he mean that I was trying to stand out as a Jew who disdained the dirty dollar? Wanting to be taken for one of my betters? In other words, assimilationism? Only I never admitted that anti-Semites of any degree were my betters.

I wasn’t trying to be absentmindedly angelic about my finances. In fact, Miss Rose, I was really not with it. My ineptness with money was part of the same hysterical syndrome that caused me to put my foot in my mouth. I suffered from it genuinely, and continue to suffer. The Walish of today has forgotten that when he went to a psychiatrist to be cured of sleeping eighteen hours at a stretch, I told him how well I understood his problem. To console him, I said, “On a good day I can be acute for about half an hour, then I start to lade out and anybody can get the better of me.” I was speaking of the dream condition or state of vague turbulence in which, with isolated moments of clarity, most o us exist. And it never occurred to me to adopt a strategy. I told you before that at one time it seemed a practical necessity to have a false self, but that I soon gave up on it. Walish, however, assumes that every clever modern man is his own avant-garde invention. To be avant-garde means to tamper with yourself, to have a personal project requiring a histrionic routine—in short, to put on an act. But what sort of act was it to trust a close relative who turned out to be a felon, or to let my late wife persuade me to hand over my legal problems to her youngest brother? It was the brother-in-law who did me in. Where others were simply unprincipled and crooked, he was in addition bananas. Patience, I am getting around to that.

Walish writes, “I thought it was time you knew what you were really like,” and gives me a going-over such as few men ever face. I abused and badmouthed everybody, I couldn’t bear that people should express themselves (this particularly irritated him; he mentions it several times) but put words into their mouths, finished their sentences for them, making them forget what they were about to say (supplied the platitudes they were groping for). I was, he says, “a mobile warehouse of middle-class spare parts,” meaning that I was stocked with the irrelevant and actually insane information that makes the hateful social machine tick on toward the bottomless pit. And so forth. As for my supernal devotion to music, that was merely a cover. The real Shawmut was a canny promoter whose
Introduction to Music Appreciation
_ was adopted by a hundred colleges (“which doesn’t happen of itself”) and netted him a million in royalties. He compares me to Kissinger, a Jew who made himself strong in the Establishment, having no political base or constituency but succeeding through promotional genius, operating as a celebrity… . Impossible for Walish to understand the strength of character, even the constitutional, biological force such an achievement would require; to appreciate (his fur-covered ear sunk in his pillow, and his small figure thrice-bent, like a small fire escape, under the wads of pink quilt) what it takes for an educated man to establish a position of strength among semiliterate politicians. No, the comparison is far-fetched. Doing eighteenth-century music on PBS is not very much like taking charge of U. S. foreign policy and coping with drunkards and liars in the Congress or the executive branch.

An honest Jew? That would be Ginsberg the Confessor. Concealing no fact, Ginsberg appeals to Jew-haters by exaggerating everything that they ascribe to Jews in their pathological fantasies. He puts them on, I think, with crazy simplemindedness, with his actual dreams of finding someone’s anus in his sandwich or with his poems about sticking a dildo into himself. This bottom-line materialistic eroticism is most attractive to Americans, proof of sincerity and authenticity. It’s on this level that they tell you they are “leveling” with you, although the deformities and obscenities that come out must of course be assigned to somebody else, some “morphodite” faggot or exotic junkie queer. When they tell you they’re “leveling,” put your money in your shoe at once, that’s my advice.

I see something else in Ginsberg, however. True, he’s playing a traditional Jewish role with this comic self-degradation, just as it was played in ancient Rome, and probably earlier. But there’s something else, equally traditional. Under all this all-revealing candor (or aggravated self-battery) is purity of heart. As an American Jew he must also affirm and justify democracy. The United States is destined to become one of the great achievements of humanity, a nation made up of many nations (not excluding the queer nation: how can anybody be left out?). The U. S. A. itself is to be the greatest of poems, as Whitman prophesied. And the only authentic living representative of American Transcendentalism is that fat-breasted, bald, bearded homosexual in smeared goggles, innocent in his uncleanness. Purity from foulness, Miss Rose. The man is a Jewish microcosm of this Midas earth whose buried corpses bring forth golden fruits. This is not a Jew who goes to Israel to do battle with Leviticus to justify homosexuality. He is a faithful faggot Buddhist in America, the land of his birth. The petrochemical capitalist enemy (an enemy that needs sexual and religious redemption) is right here at home. Who could help loving such a comedian! Besides, Ginsberg and I were born under the same birth sign, and both of us had crazy mothers and are given to inspired utterances. I, however, refuse to overvalue the erotic life. I do not believe that the path of truth must pass through all the zones of masturbation and buggery. He is consistent; to his credit, he goes all the way, which cant be said of me. Of the two of us, he is the more American.
He
_ is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—I’ve never even been proposed as a candidate—and although he has suggested that some of our recent presidents were acidheads, he has never been asked to return his national prizes and medals. The more he libels them (did LBJ use LSD?), the more medals he is likely to get. Therefore I have to admit that he is closer to the American mainstream than I am. I don’t even look like an American. (Nor does Ginsberg, for that matter.) Hammond, Indiana, was my birthplace ( just before Prohibition my old man had a saloon there), but I might have come straight from Kiev. I certainly haven’t got the build of a Hoosier—I am tall but I slouch, my buttocks are set higher than other people’s, I have always had the impression that my legs are disproportionately long: it would take an engineer to work out the dynamics. Apart from Negroes and hillbillies, Hammond is mostly foreign, there are lots of Ukrainians and Finns there. These, however, look completely American, whereas I recognize features like my own in Russian church art—the compact faces, small round eyes, arched brows, and bald heads of the icons. And in highly structured situations in which champion American executive traits like prudence and discretion are required, I always lose control and I am, as Arabs say, a hostage to my tongue.

The preceding has been fun—by which I mean that I’ve avoided rigorous examination, Miss Rose. We need to get closer to the subject. I have to apologize to you, but there is also a mystery here (perhaps of karma, as old Mrs. Gracewell suggests) that cries out for investigation. Why does anybody
say
_ such things as I said to you? Well, it’s as if a man were to go out on a beautiful day, a day so beautiful that it pressed him incomprehensibly to
do
_ something, to perform a commensurate action—or else he will feel like an invalid in a wheelchair by the seashore, a valetudinarian whose nurse says, “Sit here and watch the ripples.”

My late wife was a gentle, slender woman, quite small, built on a narrow medieval principle. She had a way of bringing together her palms under her chin when I upset her, as if she were praying for me, and her pink color would deepen to red. She suffered extremely from my fits and assumed the duty of making amends for me, protecting my reputation and persuading people that I meant no harm. She was a brunette and her complexion was fresh. Whether she owed her color to health or excitability was an open question. Her eyes were slightly extruded, but there was no deformity in this; it was one of her beauties as far as I was concerned. She was Austrian by birth (Graz, not Vienna), a refugee. I never was attracted to women of my own build—two tall persons made an incomprehensible jumble together. Also I preferred to have to search for what I wanted. As a schoolboy, I took no sexual interest in teachers. I fell in love with the smallest girl in the class, and I followed my earliest taste in marrying a slender van der Weyden or Lucas Cranach woman. The rose color was not confined to her face. There was something not exactly contemporary about her complexion, and her conception of gracefulness also went back to a former age. She had a dipping way about her: her figure dipped when she walked, her hands dipped from the wrist while she was cooking, she was a dippy eater, she dipped her head attentively when you had anything serious to tell her and opened her mouth a little to appeal to you to make better sense. In matters of principle, however irrational, she was immovably obstinate. Death has taken Gerda out of circulation, and she has been wrapped up and put away for good. No more straight, flushed body and pink breasts, nor blue extruded eyes.

What I said to you in passing the library would have appalled her. She took it to heart that I should upset people. Let me cite an example. This occurred years later, at another university (a real one), one evening when Gerda put on a dinner for a large group of academics—all three leaves were in our cherrywood Scandinavian table. I didn’t even know who the guests were. After the main course, a certain Professor Schulteiss was mentioned. Schulteiss was one of those bragging polymath types who gave everybody a pain in the ass. Whether it was Chinese cookery or particle physics or the connections of Bantu with Swahili (if any) or why Lord Nelson was so fond of William Beckford or the future of computer science, you couldn’t interrupt him long enough to complain that he didn’t let you get a word in edgewise. He was a big, bearded man with an assault-defying belly and fingers that turned back at the tips, so that if I had been a cartoonist I would have sketched him yodeling, with black whiskers and retroussщ fingertips.

One of the guests said to me that Schulteiss was terribly worried that no one would be learned enough to write a proper obituary when he died. “I don’t know if I’m qualified,” I said, “but I’d be happy to do the job, if that would be of any comfort to him.” Mrs. Schulteiss, hidden from me by Gerdas table flowers, was being helped just then to dessert. Whether she had actually heard me didn’t matter, for five or six guests immediately repeated what I had said, and I saw her move aside the flowers to look at me.