by Saul Bellow
“So what was Aunt Ettl’s sickness but a work of art? And just like this poor German fellow, she had to be prepared for failure. That’s what they mean by the ruins of time—
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher.
I suppose you know Shelley—
Go thou to Rome—at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness.
So works of art aren’t eternal. So beauty is perishable. Didn’t this saintly German wake up many mornings inspired, with joy in his heart? What more can you ask? He couldn’t be both happy and sure of being right for eternity. You have to take your chance that being happy is also being right.”
I was with him there; I nodded with answering intelligence. I had a better opinion of him. There was something to him, after all. He had some nobility of heart and was a good guy in some mysterious respects. Though what a mixture!
Meanwhile the boat sauntered through glassy stabs of light and wheewhocked on the steep drink.
And then I had to bring to mind how many times, thinking myself right, I had been wrong.
And wrong again.
And wrong again.
And again.
And how long would I be right now?
But I had great confidence in my love of Stella and her love of me.
And then again, perhaps all matters of right and wrong would finish soon, as we might not survive.
Points and crosses of diamond dazzled from the slopey blue ever-full waters. Fish and monsters did their business within. Some of our drowned were near, maybe, and passed beneath us.
Now he talked of his aunt Ettl as an artist and sounded pompous. Here it wasn’t so many days ago that he was scarcely able to fiddle his legs, and shrunk down to nothing with fright, and now look at him, astride his mental powers, sweating and round-headed, sitting there so sturdy.
“Why does an educated fellow like you ship out as carpenter?” I said, asking the question that had puzzled me for some time.
And then it came out that he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biophysicist, which he liked best of all. Six universities had canned him for his strange ideas and refused to look at his experimental results. With all this scientific training he wasn’t going to be an infantry man. So he shipped, and this was his fifth voyage. At sea he could keep up his scientific work.
Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!
He started in to tell me of this work of his, beginning with a survey of his life.
“You know how there are things every child wants to be. For instance, when I was twelve I was very fast on the ice and could have become a skating champion. But I lost interest. Then I became a stamp expert. I lost interest in that too. Next a socialist, and that didn’t last. I took up the bassoon and I quit. So I went through a large number of interests and nothing suited me. Then when I was in college I caught an extreme desire to be—or to have been—a Renaissance cardinal. That was the one thing I’d have loved. A wicked one, smoking with life, neighing and plunging. Yeah, boy! I’d put my mother in a nunnery. I’d keep my father in a gunny sack. I’d commission Michelangelo to go beyond the Farnese and the Strozzi. Spontaneous, I’d have been. Vigorous. Without embarrassment. Happy as a god. Ah, well, what can you do, impose your ideas on life? Everybody wants to be the most desirable kind of man.
“And how does it start? Well, go back to when I was a kid in the municipal swimming pool. A thousand naked little bastards screaming, punching, pushing, kicking. The lifeguards whistle and holler and punish you, the cops on duty squash you in the ribs with their thumbs and call you snot-nose. Shivery little rat. Lips blue, blood thin, scared, your little balls tight, your little thing shriveled. Skinny you. The shoving multitude bears down, and you’re nothing, a meaningless name, and not just obscure in eternity but right now. The fate of the meanest your fate. Death! But no, there must be some distinction. The soul cries out against this namelessness. And then it exaggerates. It tells you, ‘You were meant to astonish the world. You, Hymie Basteshaw, Stupor mundi! My boy, brace up. You have been called, and you will be chosen. So start looking the part. The generations of man will venerate you as long as calendars exist!’ This is neurotic, I know—excuse the jargon—but to be not neurotic is to adjust to what they call the reality situation. But the reality situation is what I have described. A billion souls boiling with anger at a doom of insignificance. Reality is also these private hopes the imagination invents. Hopes, the indispensable evils of Pandora’s Box. Assurance of a fate worth suffering for. In other words, desiring to be cast in the mold of true manhood. But who is cast in this mold? Nobody knows.
“I did my best to be as much of a Renaissance cardinal as one can under modern conditions.
“After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I’d study it. That I’d become the world’s leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn’t sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically. Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.
“I did a fair amount of research in literature and among modern thinkers. The first conclusions were obvious. Boredom starts with useless effort. You have shortcomings and aren’t what you should be? Boredom is the conviction that you can’t change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes you feel your own tiresomeness. On your social side boredom is a manifestation of the power of society. The stronger society is, the more it expects you to hold yourself in readiness to perform your social duties, the greater your availability, the smaller your significance. On Monday you are justifying yourself by your work. But on Sunday, how are you justified? Hideous Sunday, enemy of humanity. Sunday you’re on your own—free. Free for what? Free to discover what’s in your heart, what you feel toward your wife, children, friends, and pastimes. The spirit of man, enslaved, sobs in the silence of boredom, the bitter antagonist. Boredom therefore can arise from the cessation of habitual functions, even though these may be boring too. It is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force. The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request it. The harmony that is not accomplished. This lies behind boredom. But you see the endless vistas.”
Did I! I was stupefied. I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue glances of certitude.
“And I wanted to approach it scientifically,” he went on. “So my first project was to study the physiology of boredom. I looked into the muscular fatigue experiments of Jacobson and others and that led me into biochemistry. I knocked out my M.A. in record time, I may add, in cell chemistry. Keeping rat tissues alive in vitro, after Harrison and the technique improved by Carrel. This drew me on to von Wettstein, Leo Loeb, and so forth. How come the simple cells wish for immortality whereas the complex organisms get bored? The cells have the will to persist in their essence …”
There ensued certain descriptions which I don’t command the physical chemistry to repeat, the kinesis of enzymes and so forth. But the upshot of this was, that as he investigated the irritability of protoplasm he discovered some of the secrets of life. “I’m sure you’ll find it hard to believe what happened next. Nobody else has believed it.”
“You didn’t create life!”
“In all humility, that’s exactly what I did. Six universities have thrown me out for claiming it.”
“Why, it’s crazy! Are you sure that’s what you did?”
He said stiffly, “I’m a serious person. My whol
e existence has been intensely serious. I don’t intend to jeopardize my own sanity by making wild claims. I get the same results time after time—protoplasm.”
“You must be a genius.”
He didn’t offer to deny this.
He’d better be one. If he wasn’t a genius I was in this boat with a maniac.
“I stumbled on this,” he said. “I am not God.”
“But couldn’t they see you had done it?”
“I couldn’t get them to. And then the first cells I made lacked two essential powers, the regenerative and the reproductive, and were sterile and fragile forms. But in the last two years I’ve made a special study of biological organizers. I’ve been in embryology, and I’ve made some further discoveries.”
He had to take a swig of water, for he had talked himself onto dry spittle. Huge-headed, huge-chested, stalwart, calm, he was like an enormous case of the finest capacities. Like one of those Egyptian mummy cases that follow the outlines of the bodies they enclose. And also his resemblance to a horse continued very strong.
“But still you haven’t explained what a man of your ability was doing as ship’s carpenter on the MacManus.”
“Continuing my experiments.”
“You mean there was some of that protoplasm aboard?”
“As a matter of fact, there was.”
“And it’s floating in the ocean now?”
“I’m sure it is.”
“And what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know. It’s one of my later forms, a great advance over that earlier, perishable form.”
“What if a new chain of evolution begins?”
“Exactly. What if?”
“Something terrible maybe. Damn you guys, you don’t care how you fiddle with nature!” I said, feeling extremely angry. “Somebody is going to burn up the atmosphere one day or kill us all with a gas.”
He conceded that it was not impossible.
“Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?” I asked him.
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” he said. And then he wouldn’t continue the conversation but fell into fascinated thought.
Often Basteshaw seemed to be thinking over my head, and he would be in a strange humor in which you could see him make an observation, both grim and amusing to himself. It made me wonder what he was up to. And for long spells, though he patrolled me still from the side of his eyes and knew my every move, he sometimes sat as heavy as a piece of foundry brass. I became very uneasy.
A couple of days went by and not a single remark was spoken. This was a strange thing, first to be overwhelmed with talk and then to be utterly isolated. Speak of boredom! Why, I began to feel as stiff as the boat itself. But I took some of the blame for this. I said to myself, “You have only this one person, one soul to deal with here—what’s the matter, can’t you do better? It’s enough like yours, this soul, as one lion is pretty nearly all the lions, and there are just the two here, and some of the last things of all could be said. You’re not doing so good, if you want to know the truth.”
I had a very strange dream on the boat’s bottom that night, which was this, that a flatfooted, in gym shoes, pug-nosed old woman panhandled me. I laughed at her. “Why, you old guzzler, I can hear the beer cans clinking in your shopping bag!” “No, them ain’t beer cans,” she said, “it’s my window-washer stuff, my squeegee and Bon Ami and such, and for the love of God, must I wash my forty-fifty windows every day of my life? Give us something, won’t you?” “Okay, okay,” I said, me the bighearted, grinning. Among other things it made me feel good to see the West Side of Chicago again. I put my hand in my pocket, and I meant to give her only chickenfeed. Being not downright stingy, but a little close on some days, to tell the truth. But to my own surprise, instead of giving her the price of a beer I gave her one coin of each kind—half a buck, a quarter, a dime, a jitney, and a penny. All these were lined up in my palm, ninety-one cents, and I dropped them in her hand. The same instant I was sorry, for it was far too much. But then I began to feel clean proud of myself. And Ugly Face, she thanked me; she was almost like a dwarf, with a wide behind. “Well, there’s a few windows free,” I said. “I haven’t got one I can call my own.” “Come,” said she warmly, “and let me treat you to a beer.” “No, thanks, mother, I’ve got to go. Thanks all the same.” I felt kindness in the depth of my breast. In kindness, I touched her on the crown of her old head and a great thrill passed through me from it. “Why, old woman,” I said, “you’ve got the hair of an angel!” “Why shouldn’t I have,” she said gently, “like other daughters of men?”
My bosom was full of stormy surprises and dark bursts of happiness.
“God send you truth,” said the window-washer dwarf. She went toward the shadow and the cool of the beer cavern.
I gave a long sigh and unwillingly woke. The stars were restless and fevery. Basteshaw was asleep in a sitting position, transversely. I regretted he wasn’t awake so I could immediately start to talk to him.
But instead of bosom fraternity, what took place next day was a battle.
Basteshaw claimed we must be close to land; he said he had seen land birds and also seaweed and floating branches. I didn’t believe him. Also, the color of the water was changing, he said, and was a yellower green. It didn’t seem so to me. He pulled his scientific authority on me. Because, he said, after all, he was a scientist; he had seen the charts and studied the currents and made the calculations and watched all the signs, so there couldn’t be any two ways about it. But the reason I resisted believing him was that I was afraid to encourage my joy and increase the heaviness of the opposite if he should be wrong.
However, the trouble didn’t start until I thought I saw a ship on the west horizon. I began to shout and leap and wave my shirt. I was frantic. And then I rushed to put a smudgepot into the water. I had taken good care of the signaling equipment and had read the instructions for using it fifty times if I’d read them once. So now with sweaty hands and anxiety-crippled fingers I started to get the pot ready.
Then Basteshaw, with that calm of voice that was his specialty and made me doubt I heard right, said, “What do you want to make signals for?”
Damn! The guy didn’t want to be saved! He wanted to pass up a chance of rescue!
I turned my back on him and lowered the pot on the water. The black smoke began to rise against the pure color of the air. I went on flagging my shirt. I could almost feel Stella’s arms slip round my waist and her face touch my shoulder. And meantime my heart filled with black murder at this lunatic Basteshaw, who sat in the stern with crossed arms. It was maddening to see him.
But now there wasn’t anything on the horizon, and I had to think my imagination had pulled a stunt on me. I was deeply graveled and felt my fatigue and weakness for the first time; with just that clong of hope departing that I had been afraid of, and sunken darkness.
“I’m sorry to tell you you were hallucinated,” he said, while I was covered with weak sweat.
“Why, you blind bastard, there is a ship out there, just over the horizon!”
“My vision is corrected to twenty-twenty,” he said. It was just that kind of pedantry that made me hate him wildly.
“You damn four-eyed fool, what makes you want to croak out here? Do you think you have a built-in compass? Maybe you believe you can navigate, but don’t expect me to have the same sublime confidence. I’m not passing up any chances.”
“Now take it easy. Nobody’s going to croak. I had a careful look at the course a few hours before we went down and I know we’re close to land. We must be, we’ve been going due east. We’re going to land on Spanish territory and be interned. Don’t you be a damn fool. Haven’t you had enough war yet? But for dumb luck you’d have been burned alive or become shark food. Now,” he said, getting severe, “listen attentively. I don’t like to chew my cabbage twice. I’ve been figuring this, and I believe luck is on our side. I’m going
to land in the Canaries and be interned. For the rest of the war I’ll just stay there and do my research. Which they wouldn’t exempt me for at home though I went to Washington with an appeal. Now. I have plenty of money in the States; my old man left me close to a hundred grand and we can work here. I’ll teach you. You’re a pretty smart fellow, though you have all kinds of cockeyed ideas about yourself. In a year you’ll know more than a Ph.D. in biochemistry. Think of the opportunity you’ve fallen into. To understand the birth of life and be in on the profoundest secrets. Wiser than the Sphinx. You’ll gaze on the riddle of the universe with comprehension!”
He went on with his oratory. I was frightened and awed. Not just by the storming of his mind, great as that was, but by the appearance once more of the sign of the recruit under which I had been born.
“I say to you this is a great chance for you, not simply to rise to eminence, not just to give your intellectual powers the very highest development, but to assist in making a historic contribution to the happiness of mankind. These experiments with cells, March, will give the clue to the origin of boredom in the higher organisms. To what used to be called the sin of acedia. The old fellows were right, for it is a sin. Blindness to life, secession, unreceptivity, a dull wall of anxious, overprotected flesh, ignorant of the subtlety of God or Nature and unfeeling toward its beauty. March, when liberated from this boredom, every man will be a poet and every woman a saint. Love will fill the world. Injustice will go, and slavery, bloodshed, cruelty. They will belong to the past, and, seeing all these horrors of past times, all mankind will sit down and weep at the memory of them, the memory of blood and the horrible life of monads, at misunderstanding and murderous rages and carnage of innocents. The breasts and bowels will melt at this vision of the past. And then a new brotherhood of man will begin. The prisons and madhouses will be museums. Like the pyramids and the ruins of Maya, they will commemorate an erroneous development of human genius. Real freedom will manifest itself, not based on politics and revolutions, which never gave it anyhow, because it’s not a gift but a possession of the man who is not bored. March, this is what my experiments are leading toward. I am going to create a serum—a serum like a new River Jordan. With respect to which I will be a Moses. And you Joshua. To lead an Israel consisting of the entire human race across it. And this is why I don’t want to go back to the States.”
