The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (44 page)

Why were the Jews such avid anthropologists? Among the founders of the science were Durkheim and Lщvy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Boas, Sapir, Lowie. They may have believed that they were demystifiers, that science was their motive and that their ultimate aim was to increase universalism. I don’t see it that way myself. A truer explanation is the nearness of ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence. This of course was the situation of Eastern Jews. The Western ones were prancing and preening like learned Germans. And were Polish and Russian Jews (in disgrace with civilized judgment, afflicted with tuberculosis and diseased eyes) so far from the imagination of savage practices? They didn’t have to make a Symbolist decision to derange their senses; they were born that way. Exotics going out to do science upon exotics. And then it all came out in Rabbinic-Germanic or Cartesian-Talmudic forms.

Cousin Seckel, by the way, had no theorizing bent. His talent was for picking up strange languages. He went down to the Louisiana bayou country to learn an Indian dialect from its last speaker, who was moribund. In a matter of months he spoke the language perfectly. So on his deathbed, the old Indian at last had somebody to talk to, and when he was gone there was only Seckel in possession of the words. The tribe lived on in him alone. I learned one of the Indian love songs from him:
“Haiy’hee, y’heey’ho
_—Kiss me before you go.” He urged me to play it in the cocktail lounge. He passed on to me also a recipe for Creole jam-balaya (ham, rice, crawfish, peppers, chicken, and tomatoes), which as a single man I have no occasion to cook. He had great skill also as a maker of primitive cat’s cradles, and had a learned paper on Indian string-figures to his credit. Some of these cat’s cradles I can still manage myself, when there are kids to entertain.

A stout young man, round-backed, Seckel had a Hasidic pallor. His plump face wore earnest lines, and the creases of his forehead resembled the frets of a musical instrument. Dark hair covered his head in virile curls, somewhat dusty from his five-hundred-mile weekly trips to Indian country. Seckel didn’t bathe much, didn’t often change his underclothes. It didn’t matter to the woman who loved him. She was Dutch, Jennie Bouwsma, and carried her books in a rucksack. She appears in my memory wearing a tarn and knee socks, legs half bare and looking inflamed in the Wisconsin winter. While in the sack with Seckel, she shouted out loudly. There were no doors, only curtains in our little rooms. Seckel hurried back and forth. His calves and buttocks were strongly developed, white, muscular. I wonder how this classic musculature got into the family.

We rented from the widow of a locomotive engineer. We had the ground floor of an old frame house.

The only book that Seckel picked up that year was
The Last of the Mohicans,
_ of which he would read the first chapter to put himself to sleep. On the theoretical side, he said he was a pluralist. Marxism was
out.
_ He also denied the possibility of a science of history—he took a strong position on this. He described himself as a Diffusionist. All culture was invented
once,
_ and spread from a single source. He had actually read G. Elliot Smith and was committed to a theory of the Egyptian origins of everything.

His sleepy eyes were deceiving. Their dazed look was a screen for labors of linguistics that never stopped. His dimples did double duty, for they were sometimes critical (I refer here to the modern crisis, the source of the
suspense).
_ I ran into Seckel in Mexico City in 1947, not too long before he died. He was leading a delegation of Indians who knew no Spanish, and since no one in the Mexican civil service could speak their lingo, Seckel was their interpreter and no doubt the instigator of their complaints as well. These silent Indians, men in sombreros and white droopy drawers, the black hair growing at the corners of their lips, came out of the sun, which was their element, into the colonnades of the government building.

All this I remember. The one thing I forget is what I myself was doing in Mexico.

It was through Seckel, via Dr. Dina Brodsky, that I learned of the work of Waldemar Jochelson (presumably a cousin by marriage) on the Koryak. At a ladies’ auxiliary sale I bought a charming book called
To the Ends of the Earth
_ (by John Perkins and the American Museum of Natural History), and found in it a chapter on the tribes of eastern Siberia. Then I recalled the monographs I had first seen years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, and borrowed the two Jesup volumes from the Regenstein Library. The women of Koryak myth, I read, were able to detach their genitalia when necessary and hang them up on the trees; and Raven, an unearthly comedian, the mythic father of the tribe, when he explored his wife’s innards, entering her from behind, found himself first of all standing in a vast chamber. In contemplating such inventions or fantasies, one should bear in mind how hard a life the Koryak led, how they struggled to survive. In winter the fishermen had to hack holes in solid ice to a depth of six feet to drop their lines in the river. Overnight these holes were filled and frozen again. Koryak huts were cramped. A woman, however, was roomy. The tribe’s mythic mother was palatial.

Very sympathetic to me (I’m sure she isn’t being merely nosy), my assistant, Miss Rodinson, comes into the office to ask why I have been bent over at the window for an hour, apparently staring down into Monroe Street. It’s only that these giant mat-green monographs borrowed from the Regenstein are hard to hold, and I rest them on the windowsill. In the eagerness of her sympathy Miss Rodinson perhaps wishes she might enter my thoughts, make herself useful. But what help can she be? Better not enter this lusterless pelagic green, the gateway to a savage Siberia that no longer exists.

Two weeks from now, I am being sent to a conference in Europe, on the rescheduling of debts, and she wants approval for travel arrangements. Will I be landing first in Paris? I say, vaguely, yes. And putting up for two nights at the Montalembert? Then Geneva, and returning via London. All this is routine. She is aware that she isn’t getting to me. Then, because I have spoken to her about Tokyo Joe Eto (my interest in such items having increased since Tanky’s patron, Dorfman, was murdered), she hands me a clipping from the
Tribune.
_ The two men who botched the execution of Tokyo Joe have themselves been executed. Their bodies were found in the trunk of a Buick parked in residential Naperville. A terrible stink had been rising from the car and there were flies parading over the lid of the trunk, denser than May Day in Red Square.

Eunice called me again, not about her brother this time but about her Uncle Mordecai, my father’s first cousin—the head of the family, insofar as there is a family, and insofar as it has a head. Mordecai—Cousin Motty, as we called him—had been hurt in an automobile accident, and as he was nearly ninety it was a serious matter—and so I was on the telephone with Eunice, speaking from a dark corner of my dark apartment. Evidently I can’t really say why I should have had it so dark. I have a clear preference for light and simple outlines, but I am stuck for the right atmosphere. I have made myself surroundings I was not ready for, a Holy Sepulchre atmosphere, far too many Oriental rugs bought from Mr. Hering at Marshall Field’s (he recently retired and devotes himself to his horse farm), and books with old bindings, which I long ago stopped reading. My only reading matter for months has been the reports of the Jesup Expedition, and I am attracted to certain books by Heidegger. But you can’t browse through Heidegger; Heidegger is hard work. Sometimes I read the poems of Auden as well, or biographies of Auden. That’s neither here nor there. I suspect I created these dark and antipathetic surroundings in an effort to revise or rearrange myself at the core. The essentials are all present. What they need is proper arrangement.

Now, why anybody should pursue such a project in one of the great capitals of the American superpower is also a subject of interest. I have never discussed this with anyone, but I have had colleagues say to me (sensing that I was up to something out-of-the-way) that there was so much spectacular action in a city like Chicago, there were so many things going on in the
outer
_ world, the city itself was so rich in opportunities for
real
_ development, a center of such wealth, power, drama, rich even in crimes and vices, in diseases, and intrinsic—not accidental—monstrosities, that it was foolish, querulous, to concentrate on oneself. The common daily life was more absorbing than anybody’s inmost anything. Well, yes, and I think I have fewer romantic illusions about this inmost stuff than most. Conscious inmosts when you come to look at them are mercifully vague. Besides, I avoid anything resembling a
grandiose initiative.
_ Also I am not isolated by choice. The problem is that I can’t seem to find the contemporaries I require.

I’ll get back to this presently. Cousin Mordecai has quite a lot to do with it.

Eunice, on the telephone, was telling me about the accident. Cousin Riva, Motty’s wife, was at the wheel, Motty’s license having been lifted years ago. Too bad. He had just discovered, after fifty years of driving, what a rearview mirror was for. Riva’s license should have been taken away, too, said Eunice, who had never liked Riva (there had been a long war between Shana and Riva; it continued through Eunice). Riva overruled everybody and would not give up her Chrysler. She had become too small to drive that huge machine. Well, she had wrecked it, finally.

“Are they hurt?”

“She wasn’t at all.
He
_ was—his nose and his right hand, pretty bad. In the hospital he developed pneumonia.”

I felt a pang at this. Poor Motty, he was already in such a state of damage before the accident.

Eunice went on. News from the frontiers of science: “They can handle pneumonia now. It used to carry them off so fast that the doctors called it ‘the old man’s friend.’ Now they’ve sent him home….”

Ah.” We had gotten another stay. It couldn’t be put off for long, but every reprieve was a relief. Mordecai was the eldest survivor of his generation, and extinction was close, and feelings had to be prepared.

Cousin Eunice had more to tell: “He doesn’t like to leave his bed. Even before the accident they had that problem with him. After breakfast he’d get under the covers again. This was hard on Riva, because she likes to be active. She went to business with him every day of her life. She said it was spooky to have Motty covering himself up in bed. It was abnormal behavior, and she forced him to go to a family counselor in Skokie. The woman was very good. She said that all his life he had got up at five A. M. to go to the shop, and it was no wonder after all the sleep he had missed if he wanted to catch up.”

I didn’t go with this interpretation. I let it pass, however. “Now let me tell you the very latest,” said Eunice. “He still has fluid in the lungs and they have to make him sit up. They force him.”

“How do they do it?”

“He has to be strapped into a chair.”

“I think I’d rather skip this visit.”

“You can’t do that. You always were a pet of his.”

This was true, and I saw now what I had done: claimed Motty’s affection, given him my own, treated him with respect, observed his birthdays, extended to him the love I had felt for my own parents. By such actions, I had rejected certain revolutionary developments of the past centuries, the advanced views of the enlightened, the contempt for parents illustrated with such charm and sharpness by Samuel Butler, who had said that the way to be born was alone, with a twenty-thousand-pound note pinned to your diaper; I had missed the classic lessons of a Mirabeau and his father, of Frederick the Great, of Old Goriot and his daughters, of Dostoyevsky’s parricides—shunning what Heidegger holds up before us as “the frightful,” using the old Greek words
deinon
_ and
deinotaton
_ and telling us that the frightful is the gate to the sublime. The very masses are turning their backs on the family. Cousin Motty in his innocence was unaware of these changes. For these and other reasons—mixed reasons—I was reluctant to visit Cousin Motty, and Eunice was quite right to remind me that this put my affection in doubt. I was in a box. Once under way, these relationships have to be played to the end. I couldn’t fink out on him. Now, Tanky, who was Motty’s nephew, hadn’t set eyes on the old man in twenty years. This was fully rational and consistent. When I last saw him the old man couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t. He was shrunken. He turned away from me. “He always loved you, Ijah.”

“And I love him.”

Eunice said, “He’s aware of everything.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Self-examination, all theoretical considerations set aside, told me that I loved the old man. Imperfect love, I admit. Still, there it was. It had always been there. Eunice, having discovered to what extent I was subject to cousinly feelings, was increasing her influence over me. So here I was picking her up in my car and driving her out to Lincolnwood, where Motty and Riva lived in a ranch-style house.

When we entered the door, Cousin Riva threw up her now crooked arms in a “hurrah” gesture and said, “Motty will be so happy….”

Quite separate from this greeting was the look her shrewd blue eyes gave us. She didn’t at all care for Eunice, and for fifty years she had taken a skeptical view of me, not lacking in sympathy but waiting for me to manifest trustworthy signs of normalcy. To me she had become a dear old lady who was also very tough-minded. I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture. She still made an effort to move with speed, as if she were dancing after the Riva she had once been. But that she was no longer. The round face had lengthened, and a Voltairean look had come into it. Her blue stare put it to you directly: Read me the riddle of this absurd transformation, the white hair, the cracked voice. My transformation, and for that matter yours. Where is your hair, and why are you stooped? And perhaps there were certain common premises. All these physical alterations seem to release the mind. For me there are further suggestions: that as the social order goes haywire and the constraints of centuries are removed, and the seams of history open, as it were, walls come apart at the corners, bonds dissolve, and we are freed to think for ourselves—provided we can find the strength to make use of the opportunity—to escape through the gaps, not succumbing in lamentations but getting on top of the collapsed pile.