Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Cousin Riva is furious at this. She already blames herself for the accident, she had been warned not to drive, and also for the strapped chair, but she will not allow Cousin Eunice to take such a critical tone. “I think I can be relied upon to look after my husband,” she says, and leaves the room. Eunice follows her, and I can hear her making a fuller explanation to the “layman,” persisting. The cure of her stutter fifty years ago sold her forever on professional help. “Send for the best” is her slogan.

To sit on the bed, I move aside Riva’s books and magazines. It comes back to me that she used to like Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Once at Lake Zurich, Illinois, she let me read her copy of The Circular Staircase. With this came all of the minute particulars, unnecessarily circumstantial. The family drove out one summer day in three cars and on the way out of town Cousin Motty stopped at a hardware store on Milwaukee Avenue and bought a clothesline to secure the picnic baskets on the roof of the Dodge. He stood on the bumpers and on the running board and lashed the baskets every-which way, crisscross.

Like the dish in which you clean watercolor brushes, Lake Zurich is yellow-green, the ooze is deep, the reeds are thick, the air is close, and the grove smells not of nature but of sandwiches and summer bananas. At the picnic table there is a poker game presided over by Riva’s mother, who has drawn down the veil of her big hat to keep off the mosquitoes and perhaps also to conceal her looks from the other players. Tanky, about two years old, escapes naked from his mother and the mashed potatoes she cries after him to eat. Shana’s brothers, Motty and Shimon, walk in the picnic grounds, discussing bakery matters. Mountainous Shimon has a hump, but it is a hump of strength, not a disfigurement. Huge hands hang from his sleeves. He cares nothing for the seersucker jacket that covers his bulging back. He bought it, he owns it, but by the way he wears it he turns it against itself. It becomes some sort of anti-American joke. His powerful step destroys small vegetation. He is deadly shrewd and your adolescent secrets burn up in the blue fire of his negating gaze. Shimon didn’t like me. My neck was too long, my eyes were too alien. I was studious. I held up a false standard, untrue to real life. Cousin Motty defended me. I can’t say that he was entirely in the right. Cousin Shana used to say of me, “The boy has an open head.” What she meant was that book learning was easy for me. As far as they went, Cousin Shimon’s intuitions were more accurate. On the shore of Lake Zurich I should have been screaming in the ooze with the other kids, not reading a stupid book (it had an embossed monochrome brown binding) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I was refusing to hand over my soul to “actual conditions,” which are the conditions uncovered now by the FBI’s sting. (The disclosures of corruption won’t go very far; the worst of the bad guys have little to fear.)

Cousin Shana was on the wrong track. What she said is best interpreted as metaphysics. It wasn’t the head that was open. It was something else. We enter the world without prior notice, we are manifested before we can be aware of manifestation. An original self exists or, if you prefer, an original soul. It may be as Goethe suggested, that the soul is a theater in which Nature can show itself, the only such theater that it has. And this makes sense when you attempt to account for some kinds of passionate observation—the observation of cousins, for example. If it were just observation in the usual sense of the term, what would it be worth? But if it is expressed “As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers,” that is a different matter. When I ran into Tanky and his hoodlum colleague at O’Hare and thought what a disembodied William Blake eye above us might see, I was invoking my own fundamental perspective, that of a person who takes into reckoning distortion in the ordinary way of seeing but has never given up the habit of referring all truly important observations to that original self or soul.

I believed that Motty in his silence was consulting the “original person.” The distorted one could die without regrets, perhaps was already dead.

The seams open, the bonds dissolve, and the untenability of existence releases you back again to the original self. Then you are free to look for real being under the debris of modern ideas, and in a magical trance, if you like, or with a lucidity altogether different from the lucidity of approved types of knowledge.

It was at about this moment that Cousin Motty beckoned me with his head. He had something to say. It was very little. Almost nothing. Certainly he said nothing that I was prepared to hear. I didn’t expect him to ask to be unbuckled. As I bent toward him I put one hand on his shoulder, sensing that he would want me to. I’m sure he did. And perhaps it would have been appropriate to speak to him in his native language, as Seckel in the bayous had spoken to his Indian, the last of his people. The word Motty now spoke couldn’t have been “ Shalom.” Why should he give such a conventional greeting? Seeing how he had puzzled me, he turned his eyes earnestly on me—they were very large. He tried again.

So I asked Riva why he was saying this, and she explained, “Oh, he’s saying ‘Scholem.’ Over and over he reminds me that we’ve been receiving mail for you from Scholem Stavis….”

“From Cousin Scholem?… Not Shalom.”

“He must not have an address for you.”

“I’m unlisted. And we haven’t seen each other in thirty years. You could have told him where to reach me.”

“My dear, I had my hands full. I wish you would take all this stuff away. It fills a whole drawer in my pantry, and it’s been on Motty’s mind as unfinished business. He’ll feel much better. When you take it.”

As she said “take all this stuff away” she glanced toward Eunice. It was a heavy glance. “Take this cross from me” was her message. Sighing, she led me to the kitchen.

Scholem Stavis, a Brodsky on his mother’s side, was one of the blue-eyed breed of cousins, like Shimon and Seckel. When Tanky in that memorable moment at O’Hare Airport had spoken of geniuses in the family—“We had a couple or three”—he was referring also to Scholem, holding the pair of us up to ridicule. “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” was the category his remark fell into, together with “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Old-style immigrant families had looked eagerly for prodigies. Certain of the children had tried to gratify their hopes. You couldn’t blame Tanky for grinning at the failure of such expectations.

Scholem and I, growing up on neighboring streets, attending the same schools, had traded books, and since Scholem had no trivial interests, it was Kant and Schelling all the way, it was Darwin and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and in our senior year in high school it was Oswald Spengler. A whole year was invested in The Decline of the West. In his letters (Riva gave me a Treasure Island shopping bag to carry them in) Scholem reminded me of these shared interests. He wrote with a dated dignity that I rather appreciated. He sounded just a little like the Constance Garnett translations of Dostoyevsky. He addressed me as “Brodsky.” I still prefer the Garnett translations to all later ones. It isn’t real Dostoyevsky if it doesn’t say, “Just so, Porfiry Petrovitch,” or “I worshipped Tanya, as it were.” I take a more slam-bang approach to things myself. I have a weakness for modern speed and even a touch of blasphemy. I offer as an example Auden’s remark about Rilke, “The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho.” Just to emphasize that we can’t afford to forget the dissolution of the bonds (announced at Jena, 1806). But of course I didn’t dispute the superiority of Dostoyevsky or Beethoven, whom Scholem always mentioned as the Titans. Scholem had been and remained a Titanist. The documents I brought home from Rivas pantry kept me up until four in the morning. I didn’t sleep at all.