The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow

by Bellow, Saul

  His conversation amused me, in the dining room. He was proud of his revolutionary activities, which had consisted mainly of cranking the mimeograph machine. Internal Bulletins. Thousands of pages of recondite examination of fine points of doctrine for the membership. Whether the American working class should give material_ aid to the Loyalist Government of Spain, controlled as that was by Stalinists and other class enemies and traitors. You had to fight Franco, and you had to fight Stalin as well. There was, of course, no material aid to give. But had_ there been any, should_ it have been given? This purely theoretical problem caused splits and expulsions. I always kept myself informed of these curious agonies of sectarianism, Mosby wrote. The single effort made by Spanish Republicans to purchase arms in the United States was thwarted by that friend of liberty Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who allowed one ship, the Mar Cantdbrico,_ to be loaded but set the Coast Guard after it to turn it back to port. It was, I believe, that genius_ of diplomacy, Mr. Cordell Hull, who was responsible, but the decision, of course, was referred to FDR whom Huey Long amusingly called Franklin de la No!_ But perhaps the most refined of these internal discussions left of left, the documents for which were turned out on the machine by that Jimmy Higgins, the tubby devoted party-worker Mr. Lustgarten, had to do with the Finnish war. Here the painful point of doctrine to be resolved was whether a Workers’ State like the Soviet Union, even if it was a degenerate_ Workers’ State, a product of the Thermidorian Reaction following the glorious Proletarian Revolution of 1917, could wage an Imperialistic War. For only the bourgeoisie could be Imperialistic. Technically, Stalinism could not be Imperialism. By definition. What then should a Revolutionary Party say to the Finns? Should they resist Russia or not? The Russians were monsters but they would expropriate the Mannerheim White-Guardist landowners and move, painful though it might be, in the correct historical direction. This, as a sect-watcher, I greatly relished. But it was too foreign a subtlety for many of the sectarians. Who were, after all, Americans. Pragmatists at heart. It was too_ far out for Lustgarten. He decided, after the war, to become (it shouldn’t be hard) a rich man. Took his savings and, I believe his wife said, his mother’s savings, and went abroad to build a fortune.

  Within a year he had lost it all. He was cheated. By a German partner, in particular. But also he was caught smuggling by Belgian authorities.

  When Mosby met him (Mosby speaking of himself in the third person as Henry Adams had done in The Education of Henry Adams)_—when Mosby met him, Lustgarten was working for the American army, employed by Graves Registration. Something to do with the procurement of crosses. Or with supervision of the lawns. Official employment gave Lustgarten PX privileges. He was rebuilding his financial foundations by the illegal sale of cigarettes. He dealt also in gas-ration coupons which the French government, anxious to obtain dollars, would give you if you exchanged your money at the legal rate. The gas coupons were sold on the black market. The Lustgartens, husband and wife, persuaded Mosby to do this once. For them, he cashed his dollars at the bank, not with la Mine-Crevщe. The occasion seemed important. Mosby gathered that Lustgarten had to drive at once to Munich. He had gone into the dental-supply business there with a German dentist who now denied that they had ever been partners.

  Many consultations between Lustgarten (in his international intriguer’s trench coat, ill-fitting; head, neck, and shoulders sloping backward in a froggy curve) and his wife, a young woman in an eyelet-lace blouse and black velveteen skirt, a velveteen ribbon tied on her round, healthy neck. Lustgarten, on the circular floor of the bank, explaining as they stood apart. And sweating blood; being reasonable with Trudy, detail by tortuous detail. It grated away poor Lustgartens patience. Hands feebly remonstrating. For she asked female questions or raised objections which gave him agonies of patient rationality. Only there was nothing rational to begin with. That is, he had had no legal right to go into business with the German. All such arrangements had to be licensed by the military government. It was a black-market partnership and when it began to show a profit, the German threw Lustgarten out. With what they call impunity. Germany as a whole having discerned the limits of all civilized systems of punishment as compared with the unbounded possibilities of crime. The bank in Paris, where these explanations between Lustgarten and Trudy were taking place, had an interior of some sort of red porphyry. Like raw meat. A color which bourgeois France seemed to have vested with ideas of potency, mettle, and grandeur. In the Invalides also, Napoleon’s sarcophagus was of polished red stone, a great, swooping, polished cradle containing the little green corpse. (We have the testimony of M. Rideau, the Bonapartist historian, as to the color.) As for the living Bonaparte, Mosby felt, with Auguste Comte, that he had been an anachronism. The Revolution was historically necessary. It was socially justified. Politically, economically, it was a move toward industrial democracy. But the Napoleonic drama itself belonged to an archaic category of personal ambitions, feudal ideas of war. Older than feudalism. Older than Rome. The commander at the head of armies—nothing rational to recommend it. Society, increasingly rational in its organization, did not need it. But humankind evidently desired it. War is a luxurious pleasure. Grant the first premise of hedonism and you must accept the rest also. Rational foundations of modernity are cunningly accepted by man as the launching platform of ever wilder irrationalities.

  Mosby, writing these reflections in a blue-green color of ink which might have been extracted from the landscape. As his liquor had been extracted from the green spikes of the mescal, the curious sharp, dark-green fleshy limbs of the plant covering the fields.

  The dollars, the francs, the gas rations, the bank like the beefsteak mine in which W. C. Fields invested, and shrinking but persistent dark Lustgarten getting into his little car on the sodden Parisian street. There were few cars then in Paris. Plenty of parking space. And the streets were so yellow, gray, wrinkled, dismal. But the French were even then ferociously telling the world that they had the savoir-vivre,_ the gai savoir._ Especially Americans, haunted by their Protestant ethic, had to hear this. My God—sit down, sip wine, taste cheese, break bread, hear music, know love, stop running, and learn ancient life-wisdom from Europe. At any rate, Lustgarten buckled up his trench coat, pulled down his big hoodlum’s fedora. He was bunched up in the seat. Small brown hands holding the steering wheel of the Simca Huit, and the grinning despair with which he waved.

  “Bon voyage, Lustgarten.”

  His Zapotec nose, his teeth like white pomegranate seeds. With a sob of the gears he took off for devastated Germany.

  Reconstruction is big business. You demolish a society, you decrease the population, and off you go again. New fortunes. Lustgarten may have felt, qua_ Jew, that he had a right to grow rich in the German boom. That all Jews had natural claims beyond the Rhine. On land enriched by Jewish ashes. And you never could be sure, seated on a sofa, that it was not stuffed or upholstered with Jewish hair. And he would not use German soap. He washed his hands, Trudy told Mosby, with Lifebuoy from the PX.

  Trudy, a graduate of Montclair Teachers’ College in New Jersey, knew French, studied composition, had hoped to work with someone like Nadia Boulanger, but was obliged to settle for less. From the bank, as Lustgarten drove away in a kind of doomed, latently tearful daring in the rain-drenched street, Trudy invited Mosby to the Salle Pleyel, to hear a Czech pianist performing SchЎnberg. This man, with muscular baldness, worked very hard upon the keys. The difficulty of his enterprise alone came through—the labor of culture, the trouble it took to preserve art in tragic Europe, the devoted drill. Trudy had a nice face for concerts. Her odor was agreeable. She shone. In the left half of her countenance, one eye kept wandering. Stone-hearted Mosby, making fun of flesh and blood, of these little humanities with their short inventories of bad and good. The poor Czech in his blazer with chased buttons and the muscles of his forehead rising in protest against tabula rasa—the bare skull.

  Mosby could abstract himself on such occasions. Shut out the piano
. Continue thinking about Comte. Begone, old priests and feudal soldiers! Go, with Theology and Metaphysics! And in the Posicive Epoch Enlightened Woman would begin to play her part, vigilant, preventing the managers of the new society from abusing their powers. Over Labor, the Supreme Good.

  Embroidering the trees, the birds of Mexico, looking at Mosby, and the hummingbird, so neat in its lust, vibrating tinily, and the lizard on the soil drinking heat with its belly. To bless small creatures is supposed to be real good.

  Yes, this Lustgarten was a funny man. Cheated in Germany, licked by the partner, and impatient with his slow progress in Graves Registration, he decided to import a Cadillac. Among the new postwar millionaires of Europe there was a big demand for Cadillacs. The French government, moving slowly, had not yet taken measures against such imports for rapid resale. In 1947, no tax prevented such transactions. Lustgarten got his family in Newark to ship a new Cadillac. Something like four thousand dollars was raised by his brother, his mother, his mother’s brother for the purpose. The car was sent. The customer was waiting. A down payment had already been given. A double profit was expected. Only, on the day the car was unloaded at Le Havre new regulations went into effect. The Cadillac could not be sold. Lustgarten was stuck with it. He couldn’t even afford to buy gas. The Lustgartens were seen one day moving out of the hotel, into the car. Mrs. Lustgarten went to live with musical friends. Mosby offered Lustgarten the use of his sink for washing and shaving. Weary Lustgarten, defeated, depressed, frightened at last by his own plunging, scraped at his bristles, mornings, with a modest cricket noise, while sighing. All that money—mother’s savings, brother’s pension. No wonder his eyelids turned blue. And his smile, like a spinster’s sachet, the last fragrance ebbed out long ago in the trousseau never used. But the long batrachian lips continued smiling.

  Mosby realized that compassion should be felt. But passing in the night the locked, gleaming car, and seeing huddled Lustgarten, sleeping, covered with two coats, on the majestic seat, like Jonah inside Leviathan, Mosby could not say in candor that what he experienced was sympathy. Rather he reflected that this shoe salesman, in America attached to foreign doctrines, who could not relinquish Europe in the New World, was now, in Paris, sleeping in the Cadillac, encased in this gorgeous Fisher Body from Detroit. At home exotic, in Europe a Yankee. His timing was off. He recognized this himself. But believed, in general, that he was too early. A pioneer. For instance, he said, in a voice that creaked with shy assertiveness, the French were only now beginning to be Marxians. He had gone through it all years ago. What did these people know! Ask them about the Shakhty Engineers! About Lenin’s Democratic Centralism! About the Moscow Trials! About “Social Fascism”! They were ignorant. The Revolution having been totally betrayed, these Europeans suddenly discovered Marx and Lenin. “Eureka!” he said in a high voice. And it was the cold war, beneath it all.

  For should America lose, the French intellectuals were preparing to collaborate with Russia. And should America win they could still be free, defiant radicals under American protection.

  “You sound like a patriot,” said Mosby.

  “Well, in a way I am,” said Lustgarten. “But I am getting to be objective. Sometimes I say to myself, ‘If you were outside the world, if you, Lustgarten, didn’t exist as a man, what would your opinion be of this or that?’ “

  “Disembodied truth.”

  “I guess that’s what it is.”

  “And what are you going to do about the Cadillac?” said Mosby.

  “I’m sending it to Spain. We can sell it in Barcelona.”

  “But you have to get it there.”

  “Through Andorra. It’s all arranged. Klonsky is driving it.”

  Klonsky was a Polish Belgian in the hotel. One of Lustgartens associates, congenitally dishonest, Mosby thought. Kinky hair, wrinkled eyes like Greek olives, and a cat nose and cat lips. He wore Russian boots.

  But no sooner had Klonsky departed for Andorra than Lustgarten received a marvelous offer for the car. A capitalist in Utrecht wanted it at once and would take care of all excise problems. He had all the necessary tuyaux,_ unlimited drag. Lustgarten wired Klonsky in Andorra to stop. He raced down on the night train, recovered the Cadillac, and started driving back at once. There was no time to lose. But after sitting up all night on the rapide,_ Lustgarten was drowsy in the warmth of the Pyrenees and fell asleep at the wheel. He was lucky, he later said, for the car went down a mountainside and might have missed the stone wall that stopped it. He was only a foot or two from death when he was awakened by the crash. The car was destroyed. It was not insured.

  Still faintly smiling, Lustgarten, with his sling and cane, came to Mosby’s cafщ table on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Sat down. Removed his hat from dazzling black hair. Asked permission to rest his injured foot on a chair. “Is this a private conversation?” he said.

  Mosby had been chatting with Alfred Ruskin, an American poet. Ruskin, though some of his front teeth were missing, spoke very clearly and swiftly. A perfectly charming man. Inveterately theoretical. He had been saying, for instance, that France had shot its collaborationist poets. America, which had no poets to spare, put Ezra Pound in Saint Elizabeth’s. He then went on to say, barely acknowledging Lustgarten, that America had had no history, was not a historical society. His proof was from Hegel. According to Hegel, history was the history of wars and revolutions. The United States had had only one revolution and very few wars. Therefore it was historically empty. Practically a vacuum.

  Ruskin also used Mosby’s conveniences at the hotel, being too fastidious for his own latrine in the Algerian backstreets of the Left Bank. And when he emerged from the bathroom he invariably had a topic sentence.

  “I have discovered the main defect of Kierkegaard.”

  Or, “Pascal was terrified by universal emptiness, but Valщry says the difference between empty space and space in a bottle is only quantitative, and there is nothing intrinsically terrifying about quantity. What is your view?”

  We do not live in bottles—Mosby’s reply.

  Lustgarten said, when Ruskin left us, “Who is that fellow? He mooched you for the coffee.”

  “Ruskin,” said Mosby.

  “That_ is Ruskin?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “I hear my wife was going out with Ruskin while I was in the hospital.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t believe such rumors,” said Mosby. “A cup of coffee, an aperitif together, maybe.”

  “When a man is down on his luck,” said Lustgarten, “it’s the rare woman who won’t give him hell in addition.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Mosby replied.

  And then, as Mosby in Oaxaca recalled, shifting his seat from the sun—for he was already far too red, and his face, bones, eyes, seemed curiously thirsty—Lustgarten had said, “It’s been a terrible experience.”

  “Undoubtedly so, Lustgarten. It must have been frightening.”

  “What crashed was my last stake. It involved family. Too bad in a way that I wasn’t killed. My insurance would at least have covered my kid brother’s loss. And my mother and uncle.”

  Mosby had no wish to see a man in tears. He did not care to sit through these moments of suffering. Such unmastered emotion was abhorrent. Though perhaps the violence of this abomination might have told Mosby something about his own moral constitution. Perhaps Lustgarten did not want his face to be working. Or tried to subdue his agitation, seeing from Mosby’s austere, though not unkind, silence that this was not his way. Mosby was by taste a Senecan. At least he admired Spanish masculinity—the varonil_ of Lorca. The clavel varonil,_ the manly red carnation, the clear classic hardness of honorable control.

  “You sold the wreck for junk, I assume?”

  “Klonsky took care of it. Now look, Mosby. I’m through with that. I was reading, thinking, in the hospital. I came over to make a pile. Like the gold rush. I really don’t know what got into me. Trudy and I were just sitting around during the war. I was too old f
or the draft. And we both wanted action. She in music. Or life. Excitement. You know, dreaming at Montclair Teachers’ College of the Big Time. I wanted to make it possible for her. Keep up with the world, or something. But really—in my hospital bed I realized—I was right the first time. I am a socialist. A natural idealist. Reading about Attlee, I felt at home again. It became clear that I am still a political animal.”

  Mosby wished to say, “No, Lustgarten. You’re a dandier of swarthy little babies. You’re a piggyback man—a giddyap horsie. You’re a sweet old Jewish Daddy.” But he said nothing.

  “And I also read,” said Lustgarten, “about Tito. Maybe the Tito alternative is the real one. Perhaps there is hope for socialism somewhere between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav type of leadership. I feel it my duty,” Lustgarten told Mosby, “to investigate. I’m thinking of going to Belgrade.”

  “As what?”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s where you could come in,” said Lustgarten. “If you would be so kind. You’re not just_ a scholar. You wrote a book on Plato, I’ve been told.”

  “On the Laws.”_

  “And other books. But in addition you know the Movement. Lots of people. More connections than a switchboard….”

  The slang of the forties.

  “You know people at the New Leader?”_

  “Not my type of paper,” said Mosby. “I’m actually a political conservative. Not what you would call a Rotten Liberal but an out-and-out conservative. I shook Franco’s hand, you know.”

  “Did you?”

  “This very hand shook the hand of the Caudillo. Would you like to touch it for yourself?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Go on,” said Mosby. “It may mean something. Shake the hand that shook the hand.”