by Bellow, Saul
“I must get out,” he told the guide. “Ladies, I find it very hard to breathe.”
HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
DEAR MISS ROSE: I almost began “My Dear Child,” because in a sense what I did to you thirty-five years ago makes us the children of each other. I have from time to time remembered that I long ago made a bad joke at your expense and have felt uneasy about it, but it was spelled out to me recently that what I said to you was so wicked, so lousy, gross, insulting, unfeeling, and savage that you could never in a thousand years get over it. I wounded you for life, so I am given to understand, and I am the more greatly to blame because this attack was so gratuitous. We had met in passing only, we scarcely knew each other. Now, the person who charges me with this cruelty is not without prejudice toward me, he is out to get me, obviously. Nevertheless, I have been in a tizzy since reading his accusations. I wasn’t exactly in great shape when his letter arrived. Like many elderly men, I have to swallow all sorts of pills. I take Inderal and quinidine for hypertension and cardiac disorders, and I am also, for a variety of psychological reasons, deeply distressed and for the moment without ego defenses.
It may give more substance to my motive in writing to you now if I tell you that for some months I have been visiting an old woman who reads Swedenborg and other occult authors. She tells me (and a man in his sixties can’t easily close his mind to such suggestions) that there is a life to come—wait and see—and that in the life to come we will feel the pains that we inflicted on others. We will suffer all that we made them suffer, for after death all experience is reversed. We enter into the souls of those whom we knew in life. They enter also into us and feel and judge us from within. On the outside chance that this old Canadian woman has it right, I must try to take up this matter with you. It’s not as though I had tried to murder you, but my offense is palpable all the same.
/ will say it all and then revise, send Miss Rose only the suitable parts._
… In this life between birth and death, while it is still possible to make amends…
I wonder whether you remember me at all, other than as the person who wounded you—a tall man and, in those days, dark on the whole, with a mustache (not worn thick), physically a singular individual, a touch of the camel about him, something amusing in his composition. If you can recall the Shawmut of those days, you should see him now. Edad con Sus Disgracias_ is the title Goya gave to the etching of an old man who struggles to rise from the chamber pot, his pants dropped to his ankles. “Together with most weak hams,” as Hamlet wickedly says to Polonius, being merciless about old men. To the disorders aforementioned I must add teeth with cracked roots, periodontia requiring antibiotics that gave me the runs and resulted in a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut, plus creeping arthritis of the hands. Winter is gloomy and wet in British Columbia, and when I awoke one morning in this land of exile from which I face extradition, I discovered that something had gone wrong with the middle finger of the right hand. The hinge had stopped working and the finger was curled like a snail—a painful new affliction. Quite a joke on me. And the extradition is real. I have been served with papers.
So at the very least I can try to reduce the torments of the afterlife by one.
It may appear that I come groveling with hard-luck stories after thirty-five years, but as you will see, such is not the case.
I traced you through Miss Da Sousa at Ribier College, where we were all colleagues in the late forties. She has remained there, in Massachusetts, where so much of the nineteenth century still stands, and she wrote to me when my embarrassing and foolish troubles were printed in the papers. She is a kindly, intelligent woman who like yourself, should I say that?_ never married. Answering with gratitude, I asked what had become of you and was told that you were a retired librarian living in Orlando, Florida.
I never thought that I would envy people who had retired, but that was when retirement was still an option. For me it’s not in the cards now. The death of my brother leaves me in a deep legal-financial hole. I won’t molest you with the facts of the case, garbled in the newspapers. Enough to say that his felonies and my own faults or vices have wiped me out. On bad legal advice I took refuge in Canada, and the courts will be rough because I tried to escape. I may not be sent to prison, but I will have to work for the rest of my natural life, will die in harness, and damn queer harness, hauling my load to a peculiar peak. One of my father’s favorite parables was about a feeble horse flogged cruelly by its driver. A bystander tries to intercede: “The load is too heavy, the hill is steep, it’s useless to beat your old horse on the face, why do you do it?”
“To be a horse was his_ idea,” the driver says.
I have a lifelong weakness for this sort of Jewish humor, which may be alien to you not only because you are Scotch-Irish (so Miss Da Sousa says) but also because you as a (pre-computer) librarian were in another sphere—zone of quiet, within the circumference of the Dewey decimal system. It is possible that you may have disliked the life of a nun or shepherdess which the word “librarian” once suggested. You may resent it for keeping you out of the modern “action”—erotic, narcotic, dramatic, dangerous, salty. Maybe you have loathed circulating other people’s lawless raptures, handling wicked books (for the most part fake, take it from me, Miss Rose). Allow me to presume that you are old-fashioned enough not to be furious at having led a useful life. If you aren’t an old-fashioned person I haven’t hurt you so badly after all. No modern woman would brood for forty years over a stupid wisecrack. She would say, “Get lost!”
Who is it that accuses me of having wounded you? Eddie Walish, that’s who. He has become the main planner of college humanities surveys in the State of Missouri, I am given to understand. At such work he is wonderful, a man of genius. But although he now lives in Missouri, he seems to think of nothing but Massachusetts in the old days. He can’t forget the evil I did. He was there when I did it (whatever it_ really was), and he writes, “I have to remind you of how you hurt Carla Rose. So characteristic of you, when she was trying to be agreeable, not just to miss her gentle intentions but to give her a shattering kick in the face. I happen to know that you traumatized her for life.” (Notice how the liberal American vocabulary is used as a torture device: By “characteristic” he means: “You are not a good person,_ Shawmut.”) Now, were you really traumatized, Miss Rose? How does Walish “happen to know”? Did you tell him? Or is it, as I conjecture, nothing but gossip? I wonder if you remember the occasion at all. It would be a mercy if you didn’t. And I don’t want to thrust unwanted recollections on you, but if I did indeed disfigure you so cruelly, is there any way to avoid remembering?
So let’s go back again to Ribier College. Walish and I were great friends then, young instructors, he in literature, I in fine arts—my specialty music history. As if this were news to you; my book on Pergolesi is in all libraries. Impossible that you shouldn’t have come across it. Besides, I’ve done those musicology programs on public television, which were quite popular.
But we are back in the forties. The term began just after Labor Day. My first teaching position. After seven or eight weeks I was still wildly excited. Let me start with the beautiful New England setting. Fresh from Chicago and from Bloomington, Indiana, where I took my degree, I had never seen birches, roadside ferns, deep pinewoods, little white steeples. What could I be but out or place? It made me scream with laughter to be called “Dr. Shawmut.” I felt absurd here, a camel on the village green. I am a high-waisted and long-legged man, who is susceptible to paradoxical, ludicrous images of himself. I hadn’t yet gotten the real picture of Ribier, either. It wasn’t true New England, it was a bohemian college for rich kids from New York who were too nervous for the better schools, unadjusted.
Now then: Eddie Walish and I walking together past the college library. Sweet autumnal warmth against a background of chill from the surrounding woods—it’s all there for me. The library is a Greek Revival building and the light in the porch is mossy and s
unny—bright-green moss, leafy sunlight, lichen on the columns. I am turned on, manic, flying. My relations with Walish at this stage are easy to describe: very cheerful, not a kink in sight, not a touch of darkness. I am keen to learn from him, because I have never seen a progressive college, never lived in the East, never come in contact with the Eastern Establishment, of which I have heard so much. What is it all about? A girl to whom I was assigned as adviser has asked for another one because I haven’t been psychoanalyzed and can’t even begin to relate to her. And this very morning I have spent two hours in a committee meeting to determine whether a course in history should be obligatory for fine-arts majors. Tony Lemnitzer, professor of painting, said, “Let the kids read about the kings and the queens—what can it hoit them?” Brooklyn Tony, who had run away from home to be a circus roustabout, became a poster artist and eventually an Abstract Expressionist. “Don’t ever feel sorry for Tony,” Walish advises me. “The woman he married is a millionairess. She’s built him a studio fit for Michelangelo. He’s embarrassed to paint, he only whittles there. He carved out two wooden balls inside a birdcage. ” Walish himself, Early Hip with a Harvard background, suspected at first that my ignorance was a put-on. A limping short man, Walish looked at me—looked upward—with real shrewdness and traces of disbelief about the mouth. From Chicago, a Ph. D. out of Bloomington, Indiana, can I be as backward as I seem? But I am good company, and by and by he tells me (is it a secret?) that although he comes from Gloucester, Mass., he’s not a real Yankee. His father, a second-generation American, is a machinist, retired, uneducated. One of the old man’s letters reads, “Your poor mother—the doctor says she has a groweth on her Virginia which he will have to operate. When she goes to surgery I expect you and your sister to be here to stand by me.”
There were two limping men in the community, and their names were similar. The other limper, Edmund Welch, justice of the peace, walked with a cane. Our Ed, who suffered from curvature of the spine, would not carry a stick, much less wear a built-up shoe. He behaved with sporting nonchalance and defied the orthopedists when they warned that his spinal column would collapse like a stack of dominoes. His style was to be free and limber. You had to take him as he came, no concessions offered. I admired him for that.
Now, Miss Rose, you have come out of the library for a breath of air and are leaning, arms crossed, and resting your head against a Greek column. To give himself more height, Walish wears his hair thick. You couldn’t cram a hat over it. But I have on a baseball cap. Then, Miss Rose, you say, smiling at me, “Oh, Dr. Shawmut, in that cap you look like an archaeologist.” Before I can stop myself, I answer, “And you look like something I just dug up.”
Awful!
The pair of us, Walish and I, hurried on. Eddie, whose hips were out of line, made an effort to walk more quickly, and when we were beyond your little library temple I saw that he was grinning at me, his warm face looking up into my face with joy, with accusing admiration. He had witnessed something extraordinary. What this something might be, whether it came under the heading of fun or psychopathology or wickedness, nobody could yet judge, but he was glad. Although he lost no time in clearing himself of guilt, it was exactly his kind of wisecrack. He loved to do the Groucho Marx bit, or give an S. J. Perel-man turn to his sentences. As for me, I had become dead sober, as I generally do after making one of my cracks. I am as astonished by them as anybody else. They may be hysterical symptoms, in the clinical sense. I used to consider myself absolutely normal, but I became aware long ago that in certain moods my laughing bordered on hysteria. I myself could hear the abnormal note. Walish knew very well that I was subject to such seizures, and when he sensed that one of my fits was approaching, he egged me on. And after he had had his fun he would say, with a grin like Pan Satyrus, “What a bastard you are, Shawmut. The sadistic stabs you can give!” He took care, you see, not to be incriminated as an accessory.
And my joke wasn’t even witty, just vile, no excuse for it, certainly not “inspiration.” Why should inspiration be so idiotic? It was simply idiotic and wicked. Walish used to tell me, “You’re a Surrealist in spite of yourself.” His interpretation was that I had raised myself by painful efforts from immigrant origins to a middle-class level but that I avenged myself for the torments and falsifications of my healthy instincts, deformities imposed on me by this adaptation to respectability, the strain of social climbing. Clever, intricate analysis of this sort was popular in Greenwich Village at that time, and Walish had picked up the habit. His letter of last month was filled with insights of this kind. People seldom give up the mental capital accumulated in their “best” years. At sixty-odd, Eddie is still a youthful Villager and associates with young people, mainly. I have accepted old age.
It isn’t easy to write with arthritic fingers. My lawyer, whose fatal advice I followed (he is the youngest brother of my wife, who passed away last year), urged me to go to British Columbia, where, because of the Japanese current, flowers grow in midwinter, and the air is purer. There are indeed primroses out in the snow, but my hands are crippled and I am afraid that I may have to take gold injections if they don’t improve. Nevertheless, I build up the fire and sit concentrating in the rocker because I need to make it worth your while to consider these facts with me. If I am to believe Walish, you have trembled from that day onward like a flame on a middle-class altar of undeserved humiliation. One of the insulted and injured.
From my side I have to admit that it was hard for me to acquire decent manners, not because I was naturally rude but because I felt the strain of my position. I came to believe for a time that I couldn’t get on in life until I, too, had a false self like everybody else and so I made special efforts to be considerate, deferential, civil. And of course I overdid things and wiped myself twice where people of better breeding only wiped once. But no such program of betterment could hold me for long. I set it up, and then I tore it down, and burned it in a raging bonfire.
Walish, I must tell you, gives me the business in his letter. Why was it, he asks, that when people groped in conversations I supplied the missing phrases and finished their sentences with greedy pedantry? Walish alleges that I was showing off, shuffling out of my vulgar origins, making up to the genteel and qualifying as the kind of Jew acceptable ( just barely) to the Christian society of T. S. Eliot’s dreams. Walish pictures me as an upwardly mobile pariah seeking bondage as one would seek salvation. In reaction, he says, I had rebellious fits and became wildly insulting. Walish notes all this well, but he did not come out with it during the years when we were close. He saved it all up. At Ribier College we liked each other. We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing. My success in musicology may have been too much for him.
Eddie told his wife—he told everyone—what I had said to you. It certainly got around the campus. People laughed, but I was depressed. Remorse: you were a pale woman with thin arms, absorbing the colors of moss, lichen, and limestone into your skin. The heavy library doors were open, and within there were green reading lamps and polished heavy tables, and books massed up to the gallery and above. A few of these books were exalted, some were usefully informative, the majority of them would only congest the mind. My Swedenborgian old lady says that angels do not read books. Why should they? Nor, I imagine, can librarians be great readers. They have too many books, most of them burdensome. The crowded shelves give off an inviting, consoling, seductive odor that is also tinctured faintly with something pernicious, with poison and doom. Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. And you, an underpriestess of this temple stepping out to look at the sky, and Mr. L№beck, your chief, a gentle refugee always stumbling over his big senile dog and apologizing to the animal, “Ach, excuse me!” (heavy on the sibilant).
Personal note: Miss Rose never was pretty, not even what the Fren
ch call_ une belle laide, or ugly beauty, a woman whose command of sexual forces makes ugliness itself contribute to her erotic power. A_ belle laide (it_ would be a French ideal) has to be a rolling-mill of lusts. Such force was lacking. No organic basis for it. Fifty years earlier Miss Rose would have been taking Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Nevertheless, even if she looked green, a man might have loved her_—_loved her for her timid warmth, or for the courage she had had to muster to compliment me on my cap. Thirty-five years ago I might have bluffed out this embarrassment with compliments, saying, “Only think, Miss Rose, how many objects of rare beauty have been dug up by archaeologists__—_the Venus de Milo, Assyrian winged bulls with the faces of great kings. And Michelangelo even buried one of his statues to get the antique look and then exhumed it. “But it’s too late for rhetorical gallantries. Vd be ashamed. Un-pretty, unmarried, the nasty little community laughing at my crack, Miss Rose, poor thing, must have been in despair.__
Eddie Walish, as I told you, would not act the cripple despite his spiral back. Even though he slouched and walked with an outslapping left foot, he carried himself with style. He wore good English tweeds and Lloyd & Haig brogans. He himself would say that there were enough masochistic women around to encourage any fellow to preen and cut a figure. Handicapped men did very well with girls of a certain type. You, Miss Rose, would have done better to save your compliment for him. But his wife was then expecting; I was the bachelor.
Almost daily during the first sunny days of the term we went out walking. I found him mysterious then.
I would think: Who is he, anyway, this (suddenly) close friend of mine? What is this strange figure, the big head low beside me, whose hair grows high and thick? With a different slant, like whipcord stripes, it grows thickly also from his ears. One of the campus ladies has suggested that I urge him to shave his ears, but why should I? She wouldn’t like him better with shaven ears, she only dreams that she might. He has a sort of woodwind laugh, closer to oboe than to clarinet, and he releases his laugh from the wide end of his nose as well as from his carved pumpkin mouth. He grins like Alfred E. Neuman from the cover of Mad_ magazine, the successor to Peck’s Bad Boy. His eyes, however, are warm and induce me to move closer and closer, but they withhold what I want most. I long for his affection, I distrust him and love him, I woo him with wisecracks. For he is a wise guy in an up-to-date postmodern existentialist sly manner. He also seems kindly. He seems all sorts of things. Fond of Brecht and Weill, he sings “Mackie Messer” and trounces out the tune on the upright piano. This, however, is merely period stuff—German cabaret jazz of the twenties, Berlin’s answer to trench warfare and exploded humanism. Catch Eddie allowing himself to be dated like that! Up-to-the-minute Eddie has always been in the avant-garde. An early fan of the Beat poets, he was the first to quote me Allen Ginsberg’s wonderful line ‘America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
