Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

You will ask: With a wife willing to struggle mortally to preserve you from the vindictiveness of the injured parties, weren’t you perversely tempted to make trouble, just to set the wheels rolling? The answer is no, and the reason is not only that I loved Gerda (my love terribly confirmed by her death), but also that when I said things I said them for art’s sake, i. e., without perversity or malice, nor as if malice had an effect like alcohol and I was made drunk on wickedness. I reject that. Yes, there has to be some provocation. But what happens when I am provoked happens because the earth heaves up underfoot, and then from opposite ends of the heavens I get a simultaneous shock to both ears. I am deafened, and I have to open my mouth. Gerda, in her simplicity, tried to neutralize the ill effects of the words that came out and laid plans to win back the friendship or all kinds of unlikely parties whose essential particles were missing and who had no capacity for friendship, no interest in it. To such people she sent azaleas, begonias, cut flowers, she took the wives to lunch. She came home and told me earnestly how many fascinating facts she had learned about them, how their husbands were underpaid, or that they had sick old parents, or madness in the family, or fifteen-year-old kids who burglarized houses or were into heroin.

I never said anything wicked to Gerda, only to provocative people. Yours is the only case I can remember where there was no provocation, Miss Rose—hence this letter of apology, the first I have ever written. You are the cause of my self-examination. I intend to get back to this later. But I am thinking now about Gerda. For her sake I tried to practice self-control, and eventually I began to learn the value of keeping one’s mouth shut, and how it can give a man strength to block his inspired words and to let the wickedness (if wickedness is what it is) be absorbed into the system again. Like the “right speech” of Buddhists, I imagine. “Right speech” is sound physiology. And did it make much sense to utter choice words at a time when words have sunk into grossness and decadence? If a La Rochefoucauld were to show up, people would turn away from him in mid-sentence, and yawn. Who needs maxims now?

The Schulteisses were colleagues, and Gerda could work on them, she had access to them, but there were occasions when she couldn’t protect me. We were, for instance, at a formal university dinner, and I was sitting beside an old woman who gave millions of dollars to opera companies and orchestras. I was something of a star that evening and wore tails, a white tie, because I had just conducted a performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, surely one of the most moving works of the eighteenth century. You would have thought that such music had ennobled me, at least until bedtime. But no, I soon began to spoil for trouble. It was no accident that I was on Mrs. Pergamon’s right. She was going to be hit for a big contribution. Somebody had dreamed up a schola cantorum, and I was supposed to push it (tactfully). The real pitch would come later. Frankly, I didn’t like the fellows behind the plan. They were a bad lot, and a big grant would have given them more power than was good for anyone. Old Pergamon had left his wife a prodigious fortune. So much money was almost a sacred attribute. And also I had conducted sacred music, so it was sacred against sacred. Mrs. Pergamon talked money to me, she didn’t mention the Stabat Mater or my interpretation of it. It’s true that in the U. S., money leads all other topics by about a thousand to one, but this was one occasion when the music should not have been omitted. The old woman explained to me that the big philanthropists had an understanding, and how the fields were divided up among Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Ford. Abroad there were the various Rothschild interests and the Volkswagen Foundation. The Pergamons did music, mainly. She mentioned the sums spent on electronic composers, computer music, which I detest, and I was boiling all the while that I bent a look of perfect courtesy from Kiev on her. I had seen her limousine in the street with campus cops on guard, supplementing the city police. The diamonds on her bosom lay like the Finger Lakes among their hills. I am obliged to say that the money conversation had curious effects on me. It reached very deep places. My late brother, whose whole life was devoted to money, had been my mother’s favorite. He remains her favorite still, and she is in her nineties. Presently I heard Mrs. Pergamon say that she planned to write her memoirs. Then I asked—and Nietzsche might have described the question as springing from my inner Fatum —“Will you use a typewriter or an adding machine?”

Should I have said that? Did I actually say it? Too late to ask, the tempest had fallen. She looked at me, quite calm. Now, she was a great lady and I was from Bedlam. Because there was no visible reaction in her diffuse old face, and the blue of her eyes was wonderfully clarified and augmented by her glasses, I was tempted to believe that she didn’t hear or else had failed to understand. But that didn’t wash. I changed the subject. I understood that despite the almost exclusive interest in music, she had from time to time supported scientific research. The papers reported that she had endowed a project for research in epilepsy. Immediately I tried to steer her into epilepsy. I mentioned the Freud essay in which the theory was developed that an epileptic fit was a dramatization of the death of one’s father. This was why it made you stiff. But finding that my struggle to get off the hook was only giving me a bloody lip, I went for the bottom and lay there coldly silent. With all my heart I concentrated on the Fatum. Fatum signifies that in each human being there is something that is inaccessible to revision. This something can be taught nothing. Maybe it is founded in the Will to Power, and the Will to Power is nothing less than Being itself. Moved, or as the young would say, stoned out of my head, by the Stabat Mater (the glorious mother who would not stand up for me), I had been led to speak from the depths of my Fatum. I believe that I misunderstood old Mrs. Pergamon entirely. To speak of money to me was kindness, even magnanimity on her part—a man who knew Pergolesi was as good as rich and might almost be addressed as an equal. And in spite of me she endowed the schola cantorum. You don’t penalize an institution because a kook at dinner speaks wildly to you. She was so very old that she had seen every sort of maniac there is. Perhaps I startled myself more than I did her.

She was being gracious, Miss Rose, and I had been trying to go beyond her, to pass her on a dangerous curve. A power contest? What might that mean-Why did I need power? Well, I may have needed it because from a position of power you can say anything. Powerful men give offense with impunity. Take as an instance what Churchill said about an MP named Driberg: “He is the man who brought pederasty into disrepute.” And Driberg instead of being outraged was flattered, so that when another member of Parliament claimed the remark for himself and insisted that his was the name Churchill had spoken, Driberg said, “ You? Why would Winston take notice of an insignificant faggot like you!” This quarrel amused London for several weeks. But then Churchill was Churchill, the descendant of Marlborough, his great biographer, and also the savior of his country. To be insulted by him guaranteed your place in history. Churchill was, however, a holdover from a more civilized age. A less civilized case would be that of Stalin. Stalin, receiving a delegation of Polish Communists in the Kremlin, said, “But what has become of that fine, intelligent woman Comrade Z?” The Poles looked at their feet. Because, as Stalin himself had had Comrade Z murdered, there was nothing to say.