The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  ‘All the influences were waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me …’ Malleable and protean, ‘easily appealed to’, busy ‘trying things on’, Augie is a natural protégé, willing prey for the nearest ‘reality instructor’: would-be ‘big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists’. First there is Grandma Lausch (no relation), the old widow who directs and manipulates the March family with the power-crazed detachment of a eugenicist. ‘Her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment’, Grandma Lausch is definitely of the hardness party. But she is old-world, Odessan, ‘Eastern’; and Augie’s subsequent mentors are embodiments of specifically American strategies and visions, as their names suggest: Mr Einhorn, Dingbat, Mrs Renling, Joe Gorman, Manny Padilla, Clem Tambow, Kayo Obermark, Robey, Mintouchian, Basteshaw (and Simon. Always Simon). With each of these small-cap ‘universalists’ – who believe that wherever they happen to be standing ‘the principal laws [are] underfoot’ – Augie goes a certain distance until he finds himself ‘in the end zone’ of his adaptability. Then he breaks free.

  So what are all these roles and models, these outfits and uniforms, these performances? Augie is on a journey but he isn’t going anywhere. If he has a destination, it is simply a stop called Full Consciousness. In a sense, Augie is heading to the point where he will become the author of his own story. He will not necessarily be capable of writing it. He will be capable of thinking it. This is what the convention of the first person amounts to. The narrator expresses his thoughts, and the novelist gives them written shape. Like all narrators, Augie is a performing artist (as a young man). And it is Bellow who provides his Portrait.

  The artist, perhaps uniquely and definingly, gets through life without belonging to anything: no organization, no human conglomerate. Everybody in Augie’s familial orbit is eventually confined to an institution – even Simon, who commits himself to the association of American money. A leaf in the wind of random influences, Augie wafts through various establishments and big concerns, leagues, cliques and syndicates. As he does so it becomes increasingly clear that whatever identity is, whatever the soul is, the institution is its opposite and its enemy. This commonplace does not remain a commonplace, under Augie’s gaze. Human amalgamation attacks his very sensorium, inspiring animal bafflement, and visionary rage. Dickens’s institutions are eccentric; Bellow’s are psychopathic. Small isn’t always beautiful, but big vibrates with meshuggah power.

  This is the dispensary:

  like the dream of a multitude of dentists’ chairs, hundreds of them in a space as enormous as an armory, and green bowls with designs of glass grapes, drills lifted zigzag as insects’ legs, and gas flames on the porcelain swivel trays – a thundery gloom in Harrison Street of limestone county buildings and cumbersome red streetcars with metal grillwork on their windows and monarchical iron whiskers of cowcatchers front and rear. They lumbered and clanged, and their brake tanks panted in the slushy brown of a winter afternoon or the bare stone brown of a summer’s, salted with ash, smoke, and prairie dust, with long stops at the clinics to let off dumpers, cripples, hunchbacks, brace-legs, crutch-wielders, tooth and eye sufferers, and all the rest.

  This is the dimestore:

  that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth … and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue – the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

  And this is the old folks’ home, where Grandma goes:

  We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes … white hair and rashy, vessel-busted hands holding canes, fans, newspapers in all languages and alphabets, faces gone in the under-surface flues and in the eyes, of these people sitting in the sunshine and leaf-burning outside or in the mealy moldiness and gravy acids of the house,

  Such writing is of course animated by love as well as pity and protest. And there are certain institutions and establishments to which Augie is insidiously drawn. The poolhall, for instance, and the anti-institution of crime. Here is Augie, in a new kind of uniform:

  Grandma Lausch would have thought that the very worst she had ever said about me let me off too light, seeing me in the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond airholes cut in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts, the click of markers, butt-thumping of cues, spat-out pollyseed shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air. Along with the blood-smelling swaggeroos, recruits for mobs, automobile thieves, stick-up men, sluggers and bouncers … neighborhood cowboys with Jack Holt sideburns down to the jawbone, collegiates, tinhorns and small-time racketeers and pugs …

  That frying jazz! Criminals are attractive because their sharply individualized energies seem to operate outside the established social arrangement. Augie is deeply candid, but he is not especially honest. Invited along on a housebreaking job, Augie doesn’t give any reason for saying yes; he simply announces that he didn’t say no.

  ‘Are you a real crook?’ asks Mr Einhorn. ‘Have you got the calling?’ At this point Mr Einhorn, the crippled property-broker (‘he had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power’), is still Augie’s primary mentor. Mr Einhorn knows how the world works; he knows about criminals and institutions. And here, in one of the book’s most memorable speeches, he lets Augie have it. One hardly needs to say that Bellow has an exquisite ear, precise and delighted in its registers: Guillaume, for example, the dog-handler who has become over-reliant on his hypodermic (‘Thees jag-off is going to get it!’); or Happy Kellerman, Simon’s much-abused coalyard manager CI never took no shit in bigger concerns’); or Anna Coblin, Mama’s cousin (‘Owgie, the telephone ringt. Hear!’). Naturally, Bellow can do all this. But from time to time he will also commandeer a character’s speech for his own ends, keeping to the broad modulation of the voice while giving them a shove upwards, hierarchically, towards the grand style. Seasoned Bellovians have learnt to accept this as a matter of convention. We still hear Einhorn, but it is an Einhorn pervaded by his creator:

  Don’t be a sap, Augie, and fall into the first trap life digs for you. Young fellows brought up in bad luck, like you, are naturals to keep the jails filled – the reformatories, all the institutions. What the state orders bread and beans long in advance for. It knows there’s an element that can be depended on to come behind bars to eat it. Or it knows how much broken rock for macadam it can expect, and whom it can count on to break it … It’s practically determined. And if you’re going to let it be determined for you too, you’re a sucker. Just what’s predicted. Those sad and tragic things are waiting to take you in – the clinks and clinics and soup lines know who’s the natural to be beat up and squashed, made old, pooped, farted away, no-purposed away. If it should happen to you, who’d be surprised? You’re a setup for it.’

  Nevertheless, as the novel nears the end of its second act, Augie continues to feel the urge to bottom out. At least the bottom is solid, when there’s no further to fall – and nothing else in his life seems solid. Soon after Einhorn’s speech Augie goes on another incautious jaunt (in a hot car) with the same hustler (Joe Gorman, the housebreaker), up north, Toledo way. Augie escapes the state troopers but gets incarcerated on another charge, in Detroit:

  ‘Lock ’em all up.’

&nbs
p; We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn’t what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren’t any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pockets your own business: that was the purpose of it. So we gave over our stuff and were taken down, past cells and zoo-rustling straw … An enormous light was on at all hours. There was something heavy about it, like the stone rolled in front of the tomb.

  Augie’s durance, though, on his detour in the Midwest, unmoored from Chicago, is internal and spiritual. Here for the first time he sees human misery stretched across a natural landscape: war veterans, the unemployed, ‘factor-shoved’ bums, haunting the railtracks (they ‘made a ragged line, like a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes through, only much more numerous’) and sleeping in heaps on the floors of disused boxcars:

  It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction … A bad night – the rain rattling hard first on one side and then on the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest

  – ‘not from revulsion,’ Augie adds, ‘which I have to say I didn’t feel.’ And we believe him. Passively, directionlessly, Augie is visiting the dark and bestial regions occupied by his mother and younger brother – alike incapable of ‘work of mind’. Some pages earlier, after an extreme humiliation, Augie has said,

  I felt I had got trampled all over my body by a thing some way connected by weight with my mother and my brother George, who perhaps this very minute was working on a broom, or putting it down to shamble in to supper; or with Grandma Lausch in the Nelson Home – somehow as though run over by the beast that kept them steady company and that I thought I was safely away from.

  And by the time Augie limps back to Chicago his family is gone. Simon has taken off, in obscure disgrace; Mama has been farmed out; and Grandma Lausch (‘My grates couldn’t hold it. I shed tears with my sleeve over my eyes’) is dead. Childhood – act one – ended with the house getting ‘darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamor, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out’. The second act – youth – ends when there is nothing to go back to, because the home is no longer a place.

  Georgie Mahchy, Augie, Simey

  Winnie Mahchy, evwy, evwy love Mama.

  So Georgie used to sing, on the novel’s opening page. And it wasn’t quite true. Winnie, Grandma Lausch’s poodle (‘a pursy old overfed dog’, ‘a dozy, long-sighing crank’), didn’t love Mama; and it remains painfully questionable whether Simon ever loved anybody. Georgie might have amended his song, so that it concluded: evwy evwy Augie love. Simon tells Augie, with full Chicagoan contempt, ‘You can’t hold your load of love, can you?’ And it’s true. Tallish, dark, flushed, ‘rosy’, with ‘high hair’, always ‘vague’ but always ‘stubborn’, Augie is unembarrassably amorous. When it comes to love, Augie just refuses to get real.

  This marks him out, locally, as an effeminate anachronism – as does his goodness. ‘You don’t keep up with the times. You’re going against history,’ says Manny Padilla. ‘The big investigation today is into how bad a guy can be, not how good he can be.’ Generally, in literature, goodness has always been bad news. As Montherlant said, happiness – the positive value – ‘writes white’. Only Tolstoy, perhaps, has made happiness swing on the page. And goodness writes purple. We’ll never know how Russian novelists would have done modern goodness. In his Russian novels, as opposed to his American novels, Nabokov’s goodies exude an aristocratic triumphalism (it’s his one dud note), striding, blaring, munching, guffawing. But Bellow is a Russian, too, as well as an American; and he makes goodness swing. Of course, Augie is an anachronism. Empathetic on a broad scale, he remains unalienated. His sufferings are reactive rather than existential. He is not a discontent: civilization, if he could get any, would suit him fine. He believes in the soul, and in human perfectibility. For the hero of a mid-twentieth-century novel, Augie is anomalously allegro; he is daringly, scandalously spry.

  With women, Augie displays an almost satirical susceptibility. First love, or first yearning, smites him as a high-school sophomore:

  I took sick with love, with classic symptoms of choked appetite and utter absorption, hankering, great refinements of respect in looks … with a miserable counterfeit of merely passing, secretly pumped with raptures and streaming painfully, I clumped by … I didn’t stop this sadhearted, worshipful blundering around or standing like painted wood across the street from the tailor shop in the bluey afternoon. Her scraggy father labored with his needle, bent over, and presumably thinking nothing of his appearance to the street in the lighted glass; her chicken-thin little sister in black gym bloomers cut paper with the big shears.

  Augie never addresses a word to Hilda Novinson, the tailor’s daughter. But he gets a little bit further with his next love-object, Esther Fenchel. At this point Augie is under the tutelage of wealthy Mrs Renting, togged up in ‘dude-ranch’ style and holidaying in a fancy hotel on Lake Michigan. In the meantime he has become acquainted with ‘the sexual sting’ (and will soon be noticing, for instance, that Guillaume’s girlfriend is ‘a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust’). Nevertheless, Augie continues to love Esther from afar, and in the high style: ‘the world had never had better color, to say it exactly as it strikes me, or finer and more reasonable articulation. Nor ever gave me better trouble. I felt I was in the real and the true …’ One night Augie glimpses Esther alone in the music room; ‘troubled and rocky’, he approaches her, saying,

  ‘Miss Fenchel, I wonder if you would like to go with me some evening to the House of David.’ Astonished, she looked up from the music. ‘They have dancing every night.’

  I saw nothing but failure, from the first word out, and felt smitten, pounded from all sides.

  ‘With you? I should say not. I certainly won’t.’

  The blood came down out of my head, neck, shoulders, and I fainted dead away.

  As always, Augie is surrounded by exemplars and counter-exemplars, showing him what to do about love and what not to do about it, in pre-war Chicago. First there is the conventional road, brutally described by Mrs Renting and duly followed by Augie’s old friend Jimmy Klein – and by tens of millions of others. This is the arrangement where loss of virginity coincides with unwanted pregnancy and unwanted marriage: marriage as an institution, and nothing more. Alternatively there is the bohemian path (in outline: illegal abortion, puerperal fever, septicaemia) followed by Augie’s fellow boarder, Mimi Villars. ‘Women are no good, Augie,’ she warns him. ‘They’re no f—– good.’ (These Bowdler dashes date the book far more noticeably than, say, the references to Sandino’s activities in Nicaragua or the unpadded picador horses in the Spanish bullring. Augie March is not otherwise dated, incidentally, and feels as immediate as the end of the millennium.) ‘They want a man in the house,’ says Mimi. ‘Just there, in the house. Sitting in his chair.’ Angie demurs, and then beautifully reflects:

  I wasn’t enough of an enemy of such things but smiled at such ruining wives too for their female softnesses. I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first stale and then poisonous because their manageresses’ thoughts were on the conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by curtains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery. These things not appearing so threatening to me as they ought to appear, I was … a fool to [Mimi], one who also could be stuck, leg-bent, in that white spiders’ secretion and par
alyzed inside women’s edifices of safety.

  There is another way: Simon’s way. ‘I am an American,’ says Augie, at the very outset. But he is not as American as Simon: ‘I want money, and I mean want; and I can handle it. Those are my assets.’ Later, when Mr Einhorn is giving Augie the lowdown on labour unions, he pronounces, with superb cynicism, ‘One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn’t last. If it makes dough it’s for dough.’ Meaning on dough’s side: pro-dough. Simon, quintessentially, is pro-dough. And this enables him to free his head of all distractions.

  He enters an arranged marriage with a girl he has never seen, Charlotte Magnus, the scion of a big-boned kindred of Chicago merchants and burghers, themselves an institution, close-knit Netherlandish folk – Simon’s patrons or backers. Their world is summoned in terms of furniture and textures, the ‘carpeted peace and gravy velour’ of the vast apartments, the ‘mobile heraldry’ of their cars rushing on soft tyres ‘toward the floating balls and moons’ of the great hotels and their ‘Jupiter’s heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of iron’. At the Magnuses’, at night, the ‘fiches-cluttered hall’ is ‘partly inventoried’ by the moonlight. Watching Charlotte preparing for her nuptials, Augie observes:

  Neither her ladies’ trimming and gewgawing, the detail of her tailored person, nor the decorating of the flat when they furnished one … was of real consequence. But in what related to the bank, the stock, the taxes, head approached to head discussing these, the great clear and critical calculations and confidences made in the key to which real dominion was set, that was what wedlock really rested on.