by Martin Amis
The deal here – and it is a deal – turns out to be unambiguously Faustian. Although the Magnuses are prepared to stake him, Simon has to deliver on his promised ability to make a rich man of himself, worthy to join the community of American money.
In spring he leased a yard, at the end of the coal season. It had no overhead track, only a long spur of siding, and the first rains made a marsh of the whole place … I was spending a good amount of rime at the office; for when [Simon] grabbed my wrist and told me, almost drunkenly, with the grime and chapping of the mouth that comes of long nervous talking, saying low, huskily, viciously, ‘There’s got to be somebody here I can trust. Got to be!’ I couldn’t refuse.
In the brilliant – and crucial – pages that follow, the coalyard becomes a figure for Simon’s marriage and Simon’s life:
Over the way was a stockyards siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on the stalk. There were rats in a corner of the yard who did not stir or go away for anyone, whole families, nursing, creeping, feeding there. a lushed-up dealer called Guzynski tore onto the scale out of the slushy yard with white steam gushing from his busted radiator … I told a hiker to clear the scale, but Guzynski was standing over his coal with a shovel and swung on him when he came near. Happy Kellerman was phoning for a squad car when Simon arrived … in the narrow space between the truck and the office wall, Simon caught him, had him by the throat, and hit him in the face with the side of the gun. This happened right below Happy and me; we were standing at the scale window, and we saw Guzynski, trapped, square teeth and hideous eyes, foul blue, and his hands hooked, not daring to snatch the gun with which Simon hit him again. He laid open Guzynski’s cheek. My heart went back on me when the cuts were torn, and I thought, Does it make him think he knows what he’s doing if the guy bleeds?
The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror … Simon’s patience and swallowing were worse to me than his wrath or flamboyance – that shabby compulsory physical patience. Another such hard thing was his speaking low and with an air of difficult endurance to Charlotte on the telephone and answering her questions with subdued repetitiousness, near the surrender point.
It is as if all the institutional weights and fetters, the gravity of the large agencies and big concerns, are pressing in on Simon; and Augie, who has swung his life on to his brother’s parallel track (he even has a stern Magnus daughter to court), must suffer this pressure vicariously, fraternally, but with utterly unwelcome clarity. The novel’s opening page bears a famous line about suppression: ‘Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.’ And we have now reached the place where that sentence was pointing. Much later, after Augie has broken clear from Chicago, he returns to the city with a disinfected eye, and he can see this suppression daubed all over the landscape like paint:
Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word.
But now the third-act climax is approaching. From this deep entanglement, from this junction of bad roads (Simon; engagement to the Magnus girl and the Magnus money; love and what to do about it), Augie must absent himself. And he escapes the only way he ever escapes anything: through inadvertency. New Year’s Eve is approaching. Neglecting his festive duties as a squire to the Magnuses, Augie accompanies Mimi Villars to a backstreet abortionist. This loyal and innocent deed is discovered and misinterpreted, spelling the end of his apprenticeship at the feet of American money. The moment is signalled by another prose epiphany, in a hospital (the penultimate institution), where Augie has taken the ailing Mimi. Here we come to understand all that Augie is not ready for:
I passed through to another division where the labor rooms were, separate cubicles, and in them saw women struggling, outlandish pain and huge-bellied distortion, one powerful face that bore down into its creases and issued a voice great and songlike in which she cursed her husband obscenely … And just then, in the elevator shaft nearby, there were screams. I stopped and waited for the rising light I saw coming steadily through the glass panels. The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheel chair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see sinews, square of chest and shoulders from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red. She too, with lost nerve, was sobbing, each hand squeezing up on itself, eyes wildly frightened; and she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other …
‘What are you doing here?’ said the nurse with angry looks. I had no right to be there.
A sonnet can be perfect, a short story pretty well unimprovable, a novella near-flawless, a novel just a few blemishes away from its platonic ideal. But the art of the long novel is an inexact art. A long novel, at its conception, bids farewell to exactitude, and to other constraints. Now, something strange, something passing strange, happens to The Adventures of Augie March as it enters its fourth act. On page 358, Augie is very much where we expect him to be: hiding out in a cinema on Madison Street, Chicago, after a union bust-up in the linen room of the Northumberland Hotel. On page 388 he is in another cinema, in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, with a fully-grown eagle on his arm. What has happened in the interim? The answer is Thea Fenchel (the older sister of Esther, back at the Lake Michigan resort). Augie March, and Augie March, have been swept off their feet.
Thea is both lover and mentor, perhaps an untenable combination. Augie has grown used to eccentrics by now, as has the reader; but Thea, a wealthy and resolute young woman, is eccentric simply because she wants to be – not forced into a weird shape by heredity or personal history or blind circumstance. In any event, tricked out in a new uniform, Augie escorts Thea south. Their plan is to buy an eagle which they will then train to hunt giant iguanas, ‘these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the mountains south of Mexico City’. And we follow them, eagerly but dazedly, over the Rio Grande, through the smells and shapes and the aromatic heat, and through the fluctuations of their anxious, lopsided, intensely realized passion. And the eagle?
Before setting out from Chicago, Augie pays a visit to the zoo – to get the general idea:
[The eagle] perched on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor parrot, in its smoke and sun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers – the pressed-down head, the killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy!
Up close, with their own eagle (‘Caligula’), Augie finds that ‘this open shadow would shut out your heart with its smell and power – the Etna feathers and clasped beak opening’, the ‘almost inaudible whiff of his spread wings’ and ‘the fan of the pinions with hidden rust and angel-of-death armpit’:
He was, however, powerfully handsome, with his onward-turned head and buff and white feathers among the darker, his eyes that were gruesome jewels and meant nothing in their little lines but cruelty, and that he was here for his own need; he was entirely a manifesto of that … trees, bushes, stones, as explicit as glare and the spice of that heat could make them. The giant bird, when Thea brought him out, seemed to shoulder it with a kind of rise of sensuality. I felt dizzy from long sleep and the wires of radiant heat curling up from road to rock.
Caligula is one of the most lavishly vivid animals in all literature (more lavish, even, than the lion in Henderson the Rain King). But for all this you have to share Augie’s bafflement, and feel partly second-gue
ssed, when he asks himself: ‘what did there have to be an eagle for?’ You know the novel is in trouble here because you keep seeking refuge in – of all things – literary criticism. Is the eagle (aguila) Augie, or what remains of his beast nature? Is the eagle money, as the twenty-five-cent coin still declares it is? Is the (American) eagle simply America? But Augie March isn’t a meaning novel: it is a gut novel. It depends not on equivalences but on the free flow of voice and feeling.
Caligula carries you, magically; it is only when he is gone (and Thea is gone, and love has failed) that you see the violence he has done to the novel’s unities. After all, it wouldn’t be right if the Great American Novel didn’t have something wrong with it. ‘You’re not special,’ Thea tells Augie, in parting. ‘You’re like everybody else.’ And what the novel now charts is Augie’s drift into the ordinary. After the fever and voodoo of Mexico, he is re-embraced by sombre Chicago, failed in love, his youth evaporating, his youthful illusions absenting themselves from his thoughts. Poor Augie babbles about his dreams (sad dreams, of disappointment and deformity), and nurses hopeless visions of reunion with idiot Georgie and blind Mama, in a little house in the country, with children and animals all around. These ordinary sadnesses are perhaps his birthright and inheritance. It may be that Augie was on to something inescapable, when he stared at the sky on his way south to Mexico:
For should I look into any air, I could recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El pillars – such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are – like a terribly conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshipers crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel that I myself was the creation of such places. How is it that human beings will submit to the gyps of previous history while mere creatures look with their original eyes?
The novel regathers itself very powerfully towards its close. When we last see him, Augie is established in the exhausted, yawning, pinch-yourself unreality of post-war Europe. He is an illicit trader (‘there was this Florentine uncle of a Rome bigshot I had to pay off, and he was one of those civilized personalities with about five motives to my one’), and he has an unreliable wife, Stella (perhaps ‘a Cressida type’, ‘a double lifer’). He can declare himself free of all influences, all Machiavellis (‘I took an oath of unsusceptibility’), before adding, with comic prescience, ‘Brother! You never are through, you just think you are!’ Sure enough, Simon – tormentor, anti-mentor, hugely loved, hugely pitied – lends his shattered presence to the gradual and reluctant conclusion. We are left, finally, with images of toil and isolation. But creative labour, and creative loneliness. Augie has fallen into the habit of going to a café every afternoon, ‘where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions’. So he is preparing himself to write – or just to imagine – his story:
all the time you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
Attentive readers will, I hope, have noticed that this is an extraordinarily written novel. There are mannerisms or tics in the way the words squirm up against each other. The compounds – ‘worry-wounded’, ‘lair-hidden’, ‘bloody-rinded’, ‘pimple-insolence’, ‘gum-chew innocence’ – which, in Bellow’s heavily sprung rhythms, sometimes career into train-wreck compression: Trafton’s gym, with its ‘liniment-groggy, flickety-rope-time, tin-locker-clashing, Loop-darkened rooms’. There are the verb-couplings: trams ‘lumbered and clanged’, billiard balls ‘kissing and bounding’, traffic ‘dived and quivered’, cars ‘snoring and trembling’ or ‘fluddering and shimmering’. It is a style that loves and embraces awkwardness, spurning elegance as a false lead, words tumbling and rattling together in the order they choose: ‘glittering his teeth and hungry’, ‘try out what of human you can live with’, ‘the long impulse from well out in ocean bobs the rotten oranges’, ‘a flatfooted, in gym shoes, pug-nosed old woman’, ‘[he] sobbed in the brakes of, he thought, most solitude’, ‘I hoped there’d something show on the horizon’, ‘I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity’, ‘hypocritic’, ‘honestest’, ‘ancientest’, ‘his brittle neck would be broke’, ‘waked-up despair’, loud-played music’. Why is ‘loud-played music’, in a dimestore, so much better than ‘loud’? Because it suggests wilfulness, vulgarity and youth, whereas ‘loud’ is just loud. Augie March isn’t written in English; its job is to make you feel how beautiful American is, with its jazzy verbs: ‘it sent my blood happy’, ‘to close a deal’, ‘to run [a nickel] into a fortune’, ‘we were making twelve knots’, ‘cover the house’ (get around it), ‘beat a check’ (leave without paying it), ‘to make time with Mimi’ (seduce), ‘This is where I shake you, Augie’ (reject). Never mind the p’s and q’s of fine prose. Whatever works …
Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality. Style judges. No other writer and no other novel makes you feel surer about this. It is as if Bellow is turning himself inside out and letting the observable world poke and prod at him nerve by nerve. Things are not merely described but registered, measured and assessed for the weight with which they bear on your soul.
The river:
At last [Simon] answered me coldly, with a cold lick of fire in his eyes, on the stationary wintriness of the cold black steel harness of the bridge over the dragging unnamable mixture of the river flowing backward with its waste.
The street guy:
He was never anything but through and through earnest when the subject was loyalty or honor; his bony dukes were ready and his Cuban heels dug down sharply; his furrowed chin was already feeling toward its fighting position on the shoulder of his starched shirt, prepared to go into his stamping dance and start slugging.
Mimi Villars, on the telephone:
‘You’ll never live to hear me beg for anything,’ were Mimi’s last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.
The recovery ward:
Shruggers, hobblers, truss and harness wearers, crutch dancers, wall inspectors, wheelchair people in bandage helmets, wound smells and drug flowers blossoming from gauze, from colorful horrors and out of the deep sinks.
The copshop:
And as the mis-minted and wrong-struck figures and faces stooped, shambled, strode, gazed, dreaded, surrendered, didn’t care … you wondered that all was stuff that was born human and shaped human … And don’t forget the dirt-hardness, the dough fats and raw meats, of those on the official side.
The Chicago roofscape:
In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and the bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel caldron of wrath, stoked with bones. A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full as it was, and over the clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row.
The sea:
In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled w
ater gadding universally, the night-glittering fury setting in … Meanwhile the boat sauntered through glassy stabs of light and wheewhocked on the steep drink.
Augie March, finally, is the Great American Novel because of its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity. In these pages the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow’s prose. Everything is in here, the crushed and the exalted and all the notches in between, from the kitchen stiff –
The angry skin of his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening … Under the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning
– to the American eagle. When an eagle flies, it isn’t a matter of ‘the simple mechanics of any little bird that went and landed as impulse tickled him, but a task of massive administration’. This is Caligula, taking to ‘the high vibrations of blue’. And this is Saul Bellow, at thirty-eight, over and above the eagle – not an individual but a messenger:
Anyway, it was glorious how he would mount away high and sit up there, really as if over fires of atmosphere, as if he was governing from up there. If his motive was rapaciousness and everything based on the act of murder, he also had a nature that felt the triumph of beating his way up to the highest air to which flesh and blood could rise. And doing it by will, not as other forms of life were at that altitude, the spores and parachute seeds who weren’t there as individuals but messengers of species.
