Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Altogether an admirable person, and a complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art. The model on which he formed himself has been wiped out. In the late thirties he and I went to the fights together, or the Club de Lisa for jazz.

Cousin Mendy was the man to approach on Scholem’s behalf because there was a fund, somewhere, set up by a relative dead these many years, the last of his branch. As I understood its provisions, this fund was set up to make essential family loans and also to pay for the education of poor relations, if they were gifted, perhaps even for their higher cultural activities. Vague about it myself, I was sure that Mendy would know, and I quickly got hold of him on the telephone. He said he would come downtown next day, delighted, he told me, to have a talk. “Been far too long, old buddy.”

The fund was the legacy of an older Eckstine, Arcadius, called Artie. Artie, of whom nothing was expected and who had never in his life tied his shoelaces, not because he was too stout (he was only plump) but because he announced to the world that he was dégagé, had come into some money toward the end of his life.

Before the Revolution, he had brought to America a Russian schoolboy’s version of Pushkin’s life, and he gave Pushkin recitations incomprehensible to us. Modern experience had never touched him. Viewed from above, Artie’s round, brownish-fair head was the head of a boy, combed with boyish innocence. He grew somewhat puffy in the cheeks and eyelids. His eyes were kiwi green. He lost one of his fingers in a barbed-wire factory in 1917. Perhaps he sacrificed it to avoid the draft. There is a “cabinet portrait” of Artie and his widowed mother, taken about seventy years ago. He poses with his thumb under his lapel. His mother, Tanya, is stout, short, and Oriental. Although she looks composed, her face is in reality inflated with laughter. Why? Well, if her legs are so plump and short that they don’t reach the floor, the cause is a comical deficiency in the physical world, ludicrously incapable of adapting itself to Aunt Tanya. Tanya’s second marriage was to a millionaire junkman, prominent in his synagogue, a plain man and strictly Orthodox. Tanya, a movie fan, loved Clark Gable and never missed a performance of Gone with the Wind. “Oy, Clark Gebble, I love him so!”

Her old husband was the first to die. She followed in her mideighties, five years later. At the time of her death, Artie was a traveler in dehydrated applesauce and was demonstrating his product in a small downstate department store when the news came. He and his wife, a childless couple, retired at once. He said he would resume his study of philosophy, in which he had majored at Ann Arbor God knows how many years ago, but the management of his property and money kept him from the books. He used to say to me, “Ijah, wot is your opinion of Chon Dewey—ha?”

When these Eckstine cousins died, it was learned that a fund for higher studies had been set up under the will—a sort of foundation, said Mendy.

“And has it been used?”

“Very little.”

“Could we get money out of it for Scholem Stavis?”

He said, “That depends,” implying that he might be able to swing it.

I had prepared an exhibit for him. He quickly grasped the essentials of Scholem’s case. “There wouldn’t be money enough to publish his life’s work. And how do we find out whether he really is to Darwin what Newton was to Copernicus?”

“It would be hard for us to decide.”

“Who would you ask?” said Mendy “We’d have to retain a few specialists. My confidence in academics is not too great.”

You think they’d steal from a defenseless genius-amateur?” Contact with inspiration often disturbs your steady worker….”

“Assuming that Scholem is inspired. Artie and his missis didn’t live long enough to enjoy their inheritance. I wouldn’t like to blow too much of their dough on a brainstorm,” said Mendy. “I’d have more confidence in Scholem if he weren’t so statuesque.”

People nowadays don’t trust you if you don’t show them your trivial humanity—Leopold Bloom in the outhouse, his rising stink, his wife’s goat udders, or whatever. The chosen standards for common humanity have moved toward this lower range of facts.

“Besides,” said Mendy, “what’s all this Christianity? Why does he have to quote from the most anti-Semitic of the Gospels? After what we’ve been through, that’s not the direction to take.”

“For all I know, he may be the heir of Immanuel Kant and can’t accept an all-Jewish outlook. He’s also an American claiming his natural right to an important position in the history of knowledge.”

“Even so,” said Mendy, “what’s this asking to be buried behind the iron curtain? Doesn’t he know what Jew-haters those Russians are—right up there with the Germans? Does he think by lying there that he’ll soak up all that hate like blotting paper? Cure them? Maybe he thinks he can—he and nobody else.”

He was working himself up to accuse Scholem of megalomania. These psychological terms lying around, tempting us to use them, are a menace. They should all be shoveled into trucks and taken to the dump.

It was interesting to consider Mendy’s own development. He was very intelligent, though you might not think so if you had observed how he had dramatized himself as a middle American of the Hoover or early Roosevelt period. He pursued the idiocies and even the pains of his Protestant models, misfortunes like the estrangement of husbands and wives, sexual self-punishment. He would get drunk in the Loop and arrive swacked on the commuter train, like other Americans. He bought an English bulldog that irritated his wife to madness. He and his motherin-law elaborated all the comical American eccentricities of mutual dislike. She went down to the cellar when he was at home and after he had gone to bed she came up to make herself a cup of cocoa in the kitchen. He would say to me, “I sent her to a nutritionist because I couldn’t understand how she could look so well and rosy on a diet of sweet rolls and cocoa.” (Histrionics, I guess, had kept her in splendid condition.) Mendy made an ally of his young son; they went on fishing trips and visited Civil War battlegrounds. He was a man-and-boy Midwesterner, living out of a W C. Fields script. And yet in the eyes under that snap-brim fedora there had always been a mixture of Jewish lights, and in his sixties he was visibly more Jewish. And, as I have said, the American model he had adopted was now utterly obsolete. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were infinitely more modern than the Punkin Crick smart alecks. Mendy was not returning to the religion of his fathers, far from it, but in semiretirement, stuck out there in Elgin, he must have been as hard up for comprehension as Cousin Motty had been in the locker room of his club.

Accordingly, it didn’t surprise him that I should take so much interest in cousins. His own interest was stirred. Unless I misinterpreted the expression of his now malformed, lumpy, warm face, he was appealing to me to extend this interest to him. He wished to draw nearer.

“You aren’t being sentimental, are you, Ijah, because you and Scholem went on such wonderful walks together? You’d probably be able to judge if you read his blockbusting book. They didn’t hire dummies at the Rand Corporation—someday I’ll ask you to tell me about that super think tank.”

“I’d rather call it sympathy, not soft sentiment.”

In the moral sphere, a wild ignorance, utter anarchy.

Mendy said, “If you tried talking to him, he’d lecture you from on high, wouldn’t he? Since you don’t understand about these zygotes and gametes, you’d be forced to sit and listen….”