by Bellow, Saul
Eddie made me an appreciative reader of Ginsberg, from whom I learned much about wit. You may find it odd, Miss Rose (I myself do), that I should have kept up with Ginsberg from way back. Allow me, however, to offer a specimen statement from one of his recent books, which is memorable and also charming. Ginsberg writes that Walt Whitman slept with Edward Carpenter, the author of Love’s Coming-of-Age;_ Carpenter afterward became the lover of the grandson of one of our obscurer presidents, Chester A. Arthur; Gavin Arthur when he was very old was the lover of a San Francisco homosexual who, when he embraced Ginsberg, completed the entire cycle and brought the Sage of Camden in touch with his only true successor and heir. It’s all a little like Dr. Pangloss’s account of how he came to be infected with syphilis.
Please forgive this, Miss Rose. It seems to me that we will need the broadest possible human background for this inquiry, which may so much affect your emotions and mine. You ought to know to whom you were speaking on that day when you got up your nerve, smiling and trembling, to pay me a compliment—to give me, us, your blessing. Which I repaid with a bad witticism drawn, characteristically, from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations. I had almost forgotten the event when Walish’s letter reached me in Canada. That letter—a strange megillah_ of which I myself was the Haman. He must have brooded with ressentiment_ for decades on my character, drawing the profile of my inmost soul over and over and over. He compiled a list of all my faults, my sins, and the particulars are so fine, the inventory so extensive, the summary so condensed, that he must have been collecting, filing, formulating, and polishing furiously throughout the warmest, goldenest days of our friendship. To receive such a document—I ask you to imagine, Miss Rose, how it affected me at a time when I was coping with grief and gross wrongs, mourning my wife (and funnily enough, also my swindling brother), and experiencing Edad con Sus Disgracias,_ discovering that I could no longer straighten my middle finger, reckoning up the labor and sorrow of threescore and ten (rapidly approaching). At our age, my dear, nobody can be indignant or surprised when evil is manifested, but I ask myself again and again, why should Eddie Walish work up my faults for thirty-some years to cast them into my teeth? This is what excites my keenest interest, so keen it makes me scream inwardly. The whole comedy of it comes over me in the night with the intensity of labor pains. I lie in the back bedroom of this little box of a Canadian house, which is scarcely insulated, and bear down hard so as not to holler. All the neighbors need is to hear such noises at three in the morning. And there isn’t a soul in British Columbia I can discuss this with. My only acquaintance is Mrs. Gracewell, the old woman (she is very old) who studies occult literature, and I can’t bother her with so different a branch of experience. Our conversations are entirely theoretical…. One helpful remark she did make, and this was: “The lower self is what the Psalmist referred to when he wrote, ‘I am a worm and no man.’ The higher self, few people are equipped to observe. This is the reason they speak so unkindly of one another.”
More than once Walish’s document (denunciation) took off from Ginsberg’s poetry and prose, and so I finally sent an order to City Lights in San Francisco and have spent many evenings studying books of his I had missed—he publishes so many tiny ones. Ginsberg takes a stand for true tenderness and full candor. Real candor means excremental and genital literalness. What Ginsberg opts for is the warmth of a freely copulating, manly, womanly, comradely, “open road” humanity which doesn’t neglect to pray and to meditate. He speaks with horror of our “plastic culture,” which he connects somewhat obsessively with the CIA. And in addition to the CIA there are other spydoms, linked with Exxon, Mobil, Standard Oil of California, sinister Occidental Petroleum with its Kremlin connections (that is_ a weird one to contemplate, undeniably). Supercapitalism and its carcinogenic petrochemical technology are linked through James Jesus Angleton, a high official of the Intelligence Community, to T. S. Eliot, one of his pals. Angleton, in his youth the editor of a literary magazine, had the declared aim of revitalizing the culture of the West against the “so-to-speak Stalinists.” The ghost of T. S. Eliot, interviewed by Ginsberg on the fantail of a ship somewhere in death’s waters, admits to having done little spy jobs for Angleton. Against these, the Children of Darkness, Ginsberg ranges the gurus, the bearded meditators, the poets loyal to Blake and Whitman, the “holy creeps,” the lyrical, unsophisticated homosexuals whose little groups the secret police track on their computers, amongst whom they plant provocateurs, and whom they try to corrupt with heroin. This psychopathic vision, so touching because there is, realistically, so much to be afraid of, and also because of the hunger for goodness reflected in it, a screwball defense of beauty, I value more than my accuser, Wal-ish, does. I truly understand. To Ginsberg’s sexual Fourth of July fireworks I say, Tee-hee. But then I muse sympathetically over his obsessions, combing my mustache downward with my fingernails, my eyes feeling keen as I try to figure him. I am a more disinterested Ginsberg admirer than Eddie is. Eddie, so to speak, comes to the table with a croupier’s rake. He works for the house. He skims from poetry.
One of Walish’s long-standing problems was that he looked distinctly Jewy. Certain people were distrustful and took against him with gratuitous hostility, suspecting that he was trying to pass for a full American. They’d sometimes say, as if discovering how much force it gave them to be brazen (force is always welcome), “What was your name before it was Walish?”—a question of the type that Jews often hear. His parents were descended from north of Ireland Protestants, actually, and his mother’s family name was Ballard. He signs himself Edward Ballard Walish. He pretended not to mind this. A taste of persecution made him friendly to Jews, or so he said. Uncritically delighted with his friendship, I chose to believe him.
It turns out that after many years of concealed teetering, Walish concluded that I was a fool. It was when the public began to take me seriously that he lost patience with me and his affection turned to rancor. My TV programs on music history were what did it. I can envision this—Walish watching the screen in a soiled woolen dressing gown, cupping one elbow in his hand and sucking a cigarette, assailing me while I go on about Haydn’s last days, or Mozart and Salieri, developing themes on the harpsichord: “Superstar! What a horseshit idiot!”
“Christ! How phony can you get!”
“Huckleberry Fink!”
My own name, Shawmut, had obviously been tampered with. The tampering was done long years before my father landed in America by his brother Pinye, the one who wore a pince-nez and was a music copyist for Sholom Secunda. The family must have been called Shamus or, even more degrading, Untershamus. The untershamus,_ lowest of the low in the Old World synagogue, was a quasi-unemployable incompetent and hanger-on, tangle-bearded and cursed with comic ailments like a large hernia or scrofula, a pauper’s pauper. “Orm, “_ as my father would say, _”aufsteif▀eivent. ” Steiffleivent__ was the stiff linen-and-horsehair fabric that tailors would put into the lining of a jacket to give it shape. There was nothing cheaper. “He was so poor that he dressed in dummy cloth.” Cheaper than a shroud. But in America Shawmut turns out to be the name of a chain of banks in Massachusetts. How do you like them_ apples! You may have heard charming, appealing, sentimental things about Yiddish, but Yiddish is a hard_ language, Miss Rose. Yiddish is severe and bears down without mercy. Yes, it is often delicate, lovely, but it can be explosive as well. “A face like a slop jar,”
“a face like a bucket of swill.” (Pig connotations give special force to Yiddish epithets.) If there is a demiurge who inspires me to speak wildly, he may have been attracted to me by this violent unsparing language.
As I tell you this, I believe that you are willingly following, and I feel the greatest affection for you. I am very much alone in Vancouver, but that is my own fault, too. When I arrived, I was invited to a party by local musicians, and I failed to please. They gave me their Canadian test for U. S. visitors: Was I a Reaganite? I couldn’t be that, but the key quest
ion was whether El Salvador might not be another Vietnam, and I lost half of the company at once by my reply: “Nothing of the kind. The North Vietnamese are seasoned soldiers with a military tradition of many centuries—really_ tough people. Salvadorans are Indian peasants.” Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut? What do I care about Vietnam? Two or three sympathetic guests remained, and these I drove away as follows: A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, “Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?”
That did it, and now I take my daily walks alone.
It is very beautiful here, with snow mountains and still harbors. Port facilities are said to be limited and freighters have to wait (at a daily fee of $10,000). To see them at anchor is pleasant. They suggest the “Invitation au Voyage,” and also “Anywhere, anywhere, Out of the world!” But what a clean and civilized city this is, with its clear northern waters and, beyond, the sense of an unlimited wilderness beginning where the forests bristle, spreading northward for millions of square miles and ending at ice whorls around the Pole.
Provincial academics took offense at my quirks. Too bad.
But lest it appear that I am always dishing it out, let me tell you, Miss Rose, that I have often been on the receiving end, put down by virtuosi, by artists greater than myself, in this line. The late Kippenberg, prince of musicologists, when we were at a conference in the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, invited me to his rooms one night to give him a preview of my paper. Well, he didn’t actually invite me. I was eager. The suggestion was mine and he didn’t have the heart to refuse. He was a huge man dressed in velvet dinner clothes, a copious costume, kelly green in color, upon which his large, pale, clever head seemed to have been deposited by a boom. Although he walked with two sticks, a sort or diable boiteux,_ there was no one faster with a word. He had published the_ great work on Rossini, and Rossini himself had made immortal wisecracks (like the one about Wagner: “Ila de beaux moments mais de mauvais quarts d’heure”)._ You have to imagine also the suite that Kippenberg occupied at the villa, eighteenth-century rooms, taffeta sofas, brocades, cool statuary, hot silk lamps. The servants had already shuttered the windows for the night, so the parlor was very close. Anyway, I was reading to the worldly-wise and learned Kippenberg, all swelled out in green, his long mouth agreeably composed. Funny eyes the man had, too, set at the sides of his head as if for bilateral vision, and eyebrows like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge. As I was reading he began to nod. I said, I m afraid I’m putting you to sleep, Professor.”
“No, no—on the contrary, you re keeping me awake,” he said. That, and at my expense, was genius, and it was a privilege to have provoked it. He had been sitting, massive, with his two sticks, as if he were on a slope, skiing into profound sleep. But even at the brink, when it was being extinguished, the unique treasure of his consciousness could still dazzle. I would have gone around the world for such a put-down.
Let me, however, return to Walish for a moment. The Walishes lived in a small country house belonging to the college. It was down in the woods, which at that season were dusty. You may remember, in Florida, what New England woods are in a dry autumn—pollen, woodsmoke, decayed and mealy leaves, spiderwebs, perhaps the wing powder of dead moths. Arriving at the Walishes’ stone gateposts, if we found bottles left by the milkman we’d grab them by the neck and, yelling, hurl them into the bushes. The milk was ordered for Peg Walish, who was pregnant but hated the stuff and wouldn’t drink it anyway. Peg was socially above her husband. Anybody, in those days, could be; Walish had below him only Negroes and Jews, and owing to his Jewy look, was not secure even in this advantage. Bohemianism therefore gave him strength. Mrs. Walish enjoyed her husband’s bohemian style, or said she did. My Pergolesi and Haydn made me less objectionable to her than I might otherwise have been. Besides, I was lively company for her husband. Believe me, he needed lively company. He was depressed; his wife was worried. When she looked at me I saw the remedy-light in her eyes.
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 con
tinue 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.
