The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (50 page)

Sitting in the El, Max Zetland wet his finger on his tongue to turn the pages of the thick newspaper. The tracks looked down on small brick houses. The El ran like the bridge of the elect over the damnation of the slums. In those little bungalows Poles, Swedes, micks, spies, Greeks, and niggers lived out their foolish dramas of drunkenness, gambling, rape, bastardy, syphilis, and roaring death. Max Zetland didn’t even have to look; he could read about it in the
Trib.
_ The little trains had yellow cane seats. Hand-operated gates of bent metal, waist-high, let you out of the car. Tin pagoda roofs covered the El platforms. Each riser of the long staircase advertised Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Iron loss made young girls pale. Max Zetland himself had a white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear, but acceptably pleasant, entering the merchandising palace on Wabash Avenue, neat in his office, smart on the telephone, fluent except for a slight Russian difficulty with initial aitches, releasing a mellow grumble when he spoke, his mind factual, tabular, prices and contracts memorized. He held in the smoke of his cigarettes as he stood by his desk. The smoke drifted narrowly from his nose. With a lowered face, he looked about. He judged with furious Jewish snobbery the laxity and brainlessness of the golf-playing goy who could afford to walk in knickers on the restricted fairway, who could be what he seemed, who had no buried fury, married no lascivious New York girls, had no idiot orphans, no house of death. Max Zetland’s hard paunch subdued by the cut of his jacket, the tense muscles of his calves showing through trouser legs, the smoke-retentive nose, the rage of taciturnity—well, in the business world one must be a nice fellow. He was an executive in a great retail organization and he
was
_ a nice fellow. He was a short-headed man whose skull had no great depth. But his face was broad, heavily masculine, self-consciously centered between the shoulders. His hair was parted in the middle and brushed flat. There was a wide space between his front teeth, which Zet inherited. Only the unshavable pucker in his father’s chin was a sign of pathos, and this hint of the pitiful Max Zetland was defied by the Russian military stoutness of his bearing, by his curt style of smoking, by the snap with which he drank a glass of schnapps. Among friends his son had various names for him. The General, the Commissar, Osipovich, Ozymandias, he often called him. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Before his third marriage, Ozymandias the widower would come home from the Loop with the
Evening American,
_ printed on peach-colored paper. He took a glass of whiskey before dinner and saw his daughter. Perhaps she was not feebleminded, only temporarily retarded. His bright son tried to tell him that Casanova was hydrocщphalie until he was eight and considered an imbecile, and that Einstein was a backward child. Max hoped she might be taught to sew. He started with table manners. Meals, for a time, were horrible. She was unreachable. In her the family face was compressed, reduced, condensed into a cat’s face. She stammered, she tottered, her legs were long and undeveloped. She picked up her skirt in company, she trickled on the toilet without closing the door. The kid gave away all the weaknesses of the breed. Relatives were sympathetic, but this sympathy of aunts and cousins Max sensed to be self-congratulatory. He coldly rejected it, looking straight before him and lengthening his straight mouth. When people spoke sympathetically to him about his daughter, he seemed to be considering the best way to put them to death.

Father Zetland read Russian and Yiddish poetry. He preferred the company of musical people and artists, bohemian garment workers, Tolstoyans, followers of Emma Goldman and of Isadora Duncan, revolutionists who wore pince-nez, Russian blouses, Lenin or Trotsky beards. He attended lectures, debates, concerts, and readings; the Utopians amused him; he respected brains and was sold on high culture. It was obtainable in Chicago, in those days.

Facing Humboldt Park, on California Avenue, the Chicago anarchists and Wobblies had their forum; the Scandinavians had their fraternal lodges, churches, a dance hall; the Galician Jews a synagogue; the Daughters of Zion their charity day nursery. On Division Street, after 1929, little savings banks crashed. One became a fish store. A tank for live carp was made of the bank marble. The vault became an icebox. A movie house turned into a funeral parlor. Nearby, the red carbarn rose from slummy weeds. The vegetarians had a grand photo of old Count Tolstoy in the window of the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant. What a beard, what eyes, and what a nose! Great men repudiated the triviality of ordinary and merely human things, including what was merely human in themselves. What was a nose? Cartilage. A beard? Cellulose. A count? A caste figure, a thing produced by epochs of oppression. Only Love, Nature, and God are good and great.

In one-hundred-percent-industrial contemporary Chicago, where shadows of loveliness were lacking, a flat wheel of land meeting a flat wheel of fresh water, intelligent boys like Zet, though fond of the world, too, were not long detained by surface phenomena. No one took Zet fishing. He did not go to the woods, was not taught to shoot, nor to clean a carburetor, nor even to play billiards or to dance. Zet concentrated on his books—his astronomy, geology,
etc.
First the blazing mass of matter, then the lifeless seas, then pulpy creatures crawling ashore, simple forms, more complex forms, and so on; then Greece, then Rome, then Arabian algebra, then history, poetry, philosophy, painting. Still wearing knickers, he was invited by neighborhood study groups to speak on the щlan vital, on the differences between Kant and Hegel. He was professorial, Germanic, the Wunderkind, Max Zetland’s secret weapon. Old Zet would be the
man
_ ol the family and young Zet its
genius.
_

“He wanted me to be a John Stuart Mill,” said Zet. “Or some shrunken little Itzkowitz of a prodigy—Greek and calculus at the age of eight, damn him!” Zet believed he had been cheated of his childhood, robbed of the angelic birthright.

He believed all that old stuff about the sufferings of childhood, the lost paradise, the crucifixion of innocence. Why was he sickly, why was he myopic, why did he have a greenish color? Why, grim old Zet wanted him to be all marrow, no bone. He caged him in reprehending punitive silence, he demanded that he dazzle the world. And he never—but never—approved of anything.

To be an intellectual was the next stage of human development, the historical fate of mankind, if you prefer. Now the masses were reading, and we were off in all directions, Zet believed. The early phases of this expansion of mind could not fail to produce excesses, crime, madness. Wasn’t that, said Zet, the meaning of books like
The Brothers Karamazov,
_ the decay produced by rationalism in the feudal peasant Russian? And parricide the first result of revolution? The resistance to the modern condition and the modern theme? The terrible wrestling of Sin and Freedom? The megalomania of the pioneers? To be an intellectual was to be a parvenu. The business of these parvenus was to purge themselves of their first wild impulses and of their crazy baseness, to change themselves, to become disinterested. To love truth. To become great.

Naturally Zetland was sent to college. College was waiting for him. He won prizes in poetry, essay contests. He joined a literary society, and a Marxist study group. Agreeing with Trotsky that Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, he joined the Spartacus Youth League, but as a revolutionist he was fairly vague. He studied logic under Carnap, and later with Bertrand Russell and Morris R. Cohen.

The best of it was that he got away from home and lived in rooming houses, the filthier the better. The best was a whitewashed former coalbin on Woodlawn Avenue. Soft coal, still stored in the adjoining shed, trickled between the whitewashed planks. There was no window. On the cement floor was a rag rug, worried together out of tatters and coming unbound. An old oak library table with cigarette burns and a shadeless floorlamp were provided. The meters for the whole house were over Zet’s cot. Rent was $2.50 a week. The place was jolly—it was bohemian, it was European. Best of all, it was Russian! The landlord, Perchik, said that he had been game-beater for Grand Duke Cyril. Abandoned in Kamchatka when the Japanese War began, he trudged back across Siberia. With him Zet had Russian conversations. Long in the teeth, Perchik wore a meager beard, and the wires of his dime-store specs were twisted. In the back he had built a little house out of pop bottles, collected in a coaster in the alleys. Rags and garbage were burned in the furnace, and the fumes blew through the hot-air registers. The landlord sang old ballads and hymns, falsetto. Really, the place couldn’t have been better. Disorderly, dirty, irregular, free, and you could talk all night and sleep late. Just what you wanted for thought, for feeling, for invention. In his happiness, Zet entertained the Perchik house with his charades, speeches, jokes, and songs. He was a laundry mangle, a time clock, a tractor, a telescope. He did
Don Giovanni
_ in all parts and voices—_”Non sperar, se non m’uccidi… Donna folle, indarno gridi. “__ He reproduced the harpsichord background in the recitatives or the oboe weeping when the Commendatore’s soul left his body. To follow up he might do Stalin addressing a party congress, a Fuller Brush salesman in German, or a submarine commander sinking an
amerikanische
_ freighter. Zet also was practically useful. He helped people to move. He minded kids for married graduate students. He cooked for the sick. He looked after people’s dogs and cats when they went out of town, and shopped for old women in the house when it snowed. Now he was something between the stout boy and the nearsighted young man with odd ideas and exotic motives. Loving, virtually Franciscan, a simpleton for God’s sake, easy to cheat. An ingщnu. At the age of nineteen he had a great deal of Dickensian heart. When he earned a little money mopping floors at Billings Hospital, he shared it with clinic patients, bought them cigarettes and sandwiches, lent them carfare, walked them across the Midway. Sensitive to suffering and to symbols of suffering and misery, his eyes filled when he went into some Depression grocery. The withered potatoes, the sprouting onions, the unhappy face of the storekeeper got him. His cat had a miscarriage, and he wept about that, too, because the mother cat was grieving. I flushed the stillborn cats down the boardless grimy toilet in the cellar. He made me testy, carrying on like that. Practicing his feelings on everyone, I said. He warned me not to be hard-hearted. I said he exaggerated everything. He accused me of a lack of sensibility. It was an odd argument for two adolescents. I suppose the power of Americanization faltered during the Depression. We broke away, and seized the opportunity to be more
foreign.
_ We were a laughable pair of university highbrows who couldn’t have a spat without citing William James and Karl Marx, or Villiers de l’lsle-Adam or Whitehead. We decided that we were the tender-minded and tough-minded of William James, respectively. But James had said that to know everything that happened in one city on a single day would crush the toughest mind. No one could be as tough as he needed to be. “You’ll be barren of sympathy if you don’t look out,” Zet said. That was the way he talked. His language was always elegant. Lord knows where his patrician style came from—Lord Bacon, perhaps, plus Hume and a certain amount of Santayana. He debated with his friends in the whitewashed cellar. His language was very pure and musical.

But then he was musical. He didn’t walk down the street without practicing a Haydn quartet, or Borodin or Prokofiev. Overcoat buttoned at the neck, he hauled his briefcase and made the violin stops inside his fuzz-lined gloves and puffed the music in his throat and cheeks. In good heart, with skin the color of yellow grapes, he did the cello in his chest and the violins high in the nose. The trees were posted in the broom-swept, dust-mixed snow and were bound to the subpavement soil and enriched by sewer seepage. Zetland and the squirrels enjoyed the privileges of motility.

Heat overpowered him when he entered Cobb Hall. Its interior was Baptist brown, austere, varnished, very like old churches. The building was kept very hot, and he felt the heat on his face immediately. It struck him on the cheeks. His goggles fogged up. He dropped the slow movement of his Borodin quartet and sighed. After the sigh he wore an intellectual, not a musical, expression. He now was ready for semiotics, symbolic logic—the reader of Tarski, Carnap, Feigl, and Dewey. A stoutish young man whose color was poor, whose sandy hair, brushed flat, had greenish lights, he sat in the hard seminar chair and fetched out his cigarettes. Playing parts, he was here a Brain. With Skinny Jones in his raveled sweater and missing front teeth, with Tisewitch whose eyebrows were kinky, with Dark Dewie—a lovely, acid, pale girl—and Miss Krehayn, a redhead and hard stutterer, he was a leading logical positivist.

For a while. In the way of mental work, he could do anything, but he was not about to become a logician. He was, however, attracted by rational analysis. The emotional struggles of mankind were never resolved. The same things were done over and over, with passion, with passionate stupidity, insectlike, the same emotional struggles repeated in daily reality—urge, drive, desire, self-preservation, aggrandizement, the search for happiness, the search for justification, the experience of coming to be and of passing away, from nothingness to nothingness. Very boring. Frightening. Doom. Now, mathematical logic could extricate you from all this nonsensical existence. “See here,” said Zet in his soiled canvas Bauhaus chair, the dropped glasses shortening his short nose. “As propositions are either true or false, whatever
is
_ is right. Leibnitz was no fool. Provided that you really know that what is, indeed
is.
_ Still, I haven’t entirely made up my mind about the religious question, as a true positivist should.”

Just then from straight-ruled Chicago, blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost, the factory whistles went off. Five o’clock. The mouse-gray snow and the hutchy bungalows, the furnace blasting, and Perchik’s shovel gritting in the coalbin. The radio boomed through the floors, to us below. It was the
Anschluss
_—Schuschnigg and Hitler. Vienna was just as cold as Chicago now; much gloomier.