The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (48 page)

The thought persistently suggested by Isabel when we meet is that man is the not-yet-stabilized animal. By this I mean not only that defective, diseased, abortive types are common (Isabel is neither defective nor sick, by the way) but that the majority of human beings will never attain equilibrium and that they are by nature captious, fretful, irritable, uncomfortable, looking for relief from their travail and angry that it does not come. A woman like Isabel, determined to make an impression of perfect balance, reflects this unhappy instability. She identifies me with errors she has freed herself from; she measures her progress by our ever-more-apparent divergence. Clever enough to be a member of the Mensa (high-IQ) society, and, on the air, a charming person, she is always somewhat somber with me, as if she weren’t altogether satisfied with her “insights.” As a national figure in a program offering enlightened interpretation to millions of listeners, Sable is “committed,”

“engaged”; but as an intelligent woman, she is secretly rueful about this enlightenment.

She talked to me about Chicago, with which, in certain respects, she identified me. “White machine aldermen tying the black mayor in knots while they strip the city of its last buck. While you, of course, see it all. You always see it all. But you’d rather go on mooning.” There was a noteworthy difference in Sable this afternoon. At cocktail time, she was made up like the dawn of day. Her dark color was the departing night. She was more perfumed than the dawn. It was otherwise a very good resemblance. No denying that she is an attractive woman. She was dressed in dark, tea-colored silk with a formal design in scarlet. She didn’t always make herself so attractive for our meetings.

Vain to pretend that I “see it all,” but what she meant when she said “mooning” was quite clear. It had two distinct and associated meanings: (1) my special preoccupations, and (2) my lifelong dream-connection with Virgie Dunton nщe Miletas, the eight-fingered concert harpist. Despite her congenital defect, Virgie had mastered the entire harp repertoire, omitting a few impossible works, and had a successful career. It’s perfectly true that I had never been cured of my feeling for Virgie—her black eyes, her round face, its whiteness, its frontal tendency, its feminine emanations, the assurances of humanity or pledges of kindness which came from it. Even the slight mutilation of her short nose—it was the result of a car accident; she refused plastic surgery—was an attraction. It’s perfectly true that for me the word “female” had its most significant representation in her. Whenever possible, I attended her concerts; I walked in her neighborhood in hopes of running into her, imagined that I saw her in department stores. Chance meetings—five in thirty years—were remembered in minute actuality. When her husband, a heavy drinker, lent me Galbraith’s book on his accomplishments in India, I read every word of it, and this can only be explained by the swollen affect or cathexis that had developed. Virgie Miletas, the Venus of rudimentary thumbs, with her electric binding power, was the real object of Sable’s “you’d rather go on mooning.” The perfect happiness I might have known with Mrs. Miletas-Dunton, like the longed-for union of sundered beings in the love myth of Aristophanes—I refrain from invoking the higher Eros described by Socrates during the long runs of the blatting El trains that used to carry me, the inspired philosophy student, from Van Buren Street and its hockshops to Sixty-third Street and its throng of junkies—was an artificial love dream and Sable was quite right to despise it.

At the Hay-Adams, where we were drinking gin and tonic, Sable now made a comment which was surprising, nothing like her usual insights, which were not. She said, “I don’t think mooning is such a satisfactory word. To be more exact, you have an exuberance that you keep to yourself. You have a crazy high energy absolutely peculiar to you. Because of this high charge you can defy the plain dirty facts that other people have to suffer through, whether they like it or not. What you are is an exuberance-hoarder, Ijah. You live on your exuberant hoard. It would kill you to be depressed, as others are.”

This was a curious attack. There was something to it. I gave her full credit for this. I preferred, however, to think it over at leisure instead of answering at once. So I started to talk to her about Cousin Scholem. I described his case to her. If he were to be interviewed on National Public Radio and received the attention he deserved (the war hero-philosopher—cabby), he might succeed in stimulating the interest and, more important, the queer generosity of the public. Sable rejected this immediately. She said he’d be too heavy. If he announced that in him Kant and Darwin had a successor at last, listeners would say, Who is this nut! She admitted that the taxis of the Marne would be rich in human interest, but the celebration would not take place until 1984; it was still a year away. She also observed that her program didn’t encourage fundraising initiatives. She said, “Are you sure the man is really dying? You have only his word for it.”

“That’s a heartless question,” I said.

“Maybe it is. You’ve always been soft about cousins, though. The immediate family threw a chill on your exuberance, and you simply turned to the cousins. I used to think you’d open every drawer in the morgue if somebody told you that there was a cousin to be found. Ask yourself how many of them would come looking for you.”

This made me smile. Sable always had had a strong sense of humor.

She said also, “At a time when the nuclear family is breaking up, what’s this excitement about collateral relatives?”

The only answer I could make came from left field. I said, “Before the First World War, Europe was governed by a royalty of cousins.”

“Yes? That came out real good, didn’t it?”

“There are people who think ofthat time as a golden age—the last of the old
douceur de vivre,
_ and so on.”

But I didn’t really mean it. The millennial history of nihilism culminated in 1914, and the brutality of Verdun and Tannenberg was a prelude to the even greater destruction that began in 1939. So here again is the all-pervading
suspense
_—the seams of history opening, the bonds in dissolution (Hegel), the constraints of centuries removed. Unless your head is hard, this will give you nothing but dizzy fits, but if you don’t yield to fits you may be carried into a kind of freedom. Disorder, if it doesn’t murder you, brings certain opportunities. You wouldn’t guess that when I sit in my Holy Sepulchre apartment at night (the surroundings that puzzled Eunice’s mind when she came to visit: “All these Oriental rugs and lamps, and so many books,” she said), wouldn’t guess that I am concentrating on strategies for pouncing passionately on the freedom made possible by dissolution. Hundreds of books, but only half a shelf of those that matter. You don’t get more goodness from more knowledge. One of the writers I often turn to concentrates on passion. He invites you to consider love and hate. He denies that hate is blind. On the contrary, hate is perspicuous. If you let hate germinate, it will eat its way inward and consume your very being, it will intensify reflection. It doesn’t blind, it increases lucidity, it opens a man up; it makes him reach out and concentrates his being so that he is able to grasp himself. Love, too, is clear-eyed and not blind. True love is not delusive. Like hate, it is a primal source. But love is hard to come by. Hate is in tremendous supply. And evidently you endanger your being by waiting for the rarer passion. So you must have confidence in hate, which is so abundant, and embrace it with your whole soul, if you hope to achieve any clarity at all.

I wasn’t about to take this up with Sable, although she would be capable of discussing it. She was still talking about my weakness for cousins. She said, “If you had cared about me as you do about all those goofy, half-assed cousins, and such, we never would have divorced.”

“Such” was a dig at Virgie.

Was Sable hinting that we try again? Was this why she had come painted like the dawn and so beautifully dressed? I felt quite flattered.

In the morning I went to Dulles and flew out on the Concorde. The International Monetary Fund was waiting for the Brazilian parliament to make up its mind. I jotted some notes toward my report and then I was free to think of other matters. I considered whether Sable was priming me to make her a proposal. I liked what she had said about hoarded exuberance. Her opinion was that, through the cousins, through Virgie, I indulged my taste for the easier affects. I lacked true modern severity. Maybe she believed that I satisfied an artist’s needs by visits to old galleries, walking through museums of beauty, happy with the charms of kinship, quite contented with painted relics, not tough enough for rapture in its strongest forms, not purified by nihilistic fire.

And about marriage… single life was tiresome. There were, however, unpleasant considerations in marriage that must not be avoided. What would I do in Washington? What would Sable do if she came to live in Chicago? No, she wouldn’t be willing to move. We’d be flying back and forth, commuting. To spell the matter out, item by item, Sable had become a public-opinion molder. Public opinion is power. She belonged to a group that held great power. It was not the kind of power I cared about. While her people were not worse jerks than their conservative opposites, they were nevertheless jerks, more numerous in her profession than in other fields, and disagreeably influential.

I was now in Paris, pulling up in front of the Montalembert. I had given up a hotel I liked better when I found cockroaches in my luggage, black ones that had recrossed the Atlantic with me and came out all set to conquer Chicago.

I inspected the room at the Montalembert and then walked down the rue du Bac to the Seine. Marvelous how much good these monumental capitals can do an American, still. I almost felt that here the sun itself should take a monumental form, something like the Mexican calendar stone, to shine on the Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie, the Pont Neuf, and other medieval relics.

Returning to the hotel after dinner, I found a message from Miss Rodinson in Chicago. “Eckstine fund will grant ten thousand dollars to Mr. Stavis.”

Good for Cousin Mendy! I now had news for Scholem, and since he would be at the Invalides tomorrow if he was alive and had made it to Paris for the planning session, I would have more than mere sympathy to offer when we met after so many decades. Mendy meant the grant to be used to determine whether Scholem’s pure philosophy, grounded in science, was all that he claimed it to be, an advance on the
Critique of Pure Reason.
_ Immediately I began to devise ways to get around Mendy. I could choose Scholem’s readers myself. I would offer them small sums—they didn’t deserve fat fees anyway, those academic nitwits. (Angry with them, you see, because they had done so little to prevent the U. S. from sinking into decadence; I blamed them, in fact, for hastening our degradation.) Five experts at two hundred bucks apiece, whom I would pay myself, would allow me to give the entire ten grand to Scholem. By using my clout in Washington, I might get a burial permit out of the East Germans for two or three thousand, bribes included. That would leave money enough for transportation and last rites. For if Scholem had a clairvoyant conviction that his burial at Torgau would shrink the world’s swollen madness to a small pellet, it might be worth a try. Interred at Waldheim in Chicago, beside the pounding truck traffic of Harlem Avenue, one could not hope to have any effect.

To catch up with European time, I stayed up late playing solitaire with a pack of outsized cards that made eyeglasses unnecessary and this put me in a frame of mind to get into bed without a fit of exuberance. Given calm and poise, I
can
_ understand my situation. Musing back and forth over the cards, I understood Sable’s complaint that I had ruined our marriage by denying it a transfusion of exuberance. Speaking of my sentiments for the cousins, she referred indirectly to the mystery of being a Jew. Sable had a handsome Jewish nose, perhaps a little too much of one. Also, she had conspicuously offered her legs to my gaze, knowing my weakness for them. She had a well-turned bosom, a smooth throat, good hips, and legs still capable of kicking in the bedroom—I used to refer to “your skip-rope legs.” Now, then, had Sable continued through three marriages to think of me as her only true husband, or was she trying her strength one last time against her rival from (Egyptian) Alexandria? Guiltless Virgie was the hate of her life, and hate made you perspicuous, failing love. Heidegger would have approved. His idea had, as it were, infected me. I was beginning to be obsessed with the two passions that made you perspicuous. Love there isn’t too much of; hate is as ubiquitous as nitrogen or carbon. Maybe hate is inherent in matter itself and is therefore a component of our bones; our very blood is perhaps swollen with it. For moral coldness in the arctic range I had found a physical image in the Siberian environment of the Koryak and the Chukchee the sub polar desert whose frosts are as severe as fire, a fit location for slave-labor camps.

Put all this together, and my idyll of Virgie Miletas might be construed as a fainthearted evasion of the reigning coldness.

Well, I could have told Sable that she couldn’t win against an unconsummated
amour
_ of so many years. It’s after all the woman you
didn’t
_ have whose effect is mortal.

I concede, however, that the real challenge is to capture and tame wickedness. Without this you remain suspended. At the mercy of the suspense over the new emergence of spirit…

But on this I sacked out.

In the morning on my breakfast tray was an express envelope from Miss Rodinson. I was in no mood to open it now; it might contain information about a professional engagement, and I didn’t want that. I was on my way to the Invalides to meet with Scholem, if he had made it there. The world cabbies’ organizing session, attended, as I noted in
Le Monde,
_ by some two hundred delegates from fifty countries, would begin at eleven o’clock. I put Miss Rodinson’s mail in my pocket with my wallet and my passport.

? e
_