Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

This is contempt, not wit. It is Oriental despotism, straight, Miss Rose. Churchill was human, Stalin merely a colossus. As for us, here in America, we are a demotic, hybrid civilization. We have our virtues but are ignorant of style. It’s only because American society has no place for style (in the sense of Voltairean or Gibbonesque style, style in the manner of Saint-Simon or Heine) that it is possible for a man like me to make such statements as he makes, harming no one but himself. If people are offended, it’s by the “hostile intent” they sense, not by the keenness of the words. They classify me then as a psychological curiosity, a warped personality. It never occurs to them to take a full or biographical view. In the real sense of the term, biography has fallen away from us. We all flutter like new-hatched chicks between the feet of the great idols, the monuments of power.

So what are words? A lawyer, the first one, the one who represented me in the case against my brother’s estate (the second one was Gerdas brother)—lawyer number one, whose name was Klaussen, said to me when an important letter had to be drafted, “ You do it, Shawmut. You’re the man with the words.”

‘And you’re the whore with ten cunts!”

But I didn’t say this. He was too powerful. I needed him. I was afraid.

But it was inevitable that I should offend him, and presently I did.

I can’t tell you why. It’s a mystery. When I tried to discuss Freud’s epilepsy essay with Mrs. Pergamon I wanted to hint that I myself was subject to strange seizures that resembled falling sickness. But it wasn’t just brain pathology, lesions, grand mal chemistry. It was a kind of perversely happy gaieté de coeur. Elements of vengefulness, or blasphemy? Well, maybe. What about demonic inspiration, what about energumens, what about Dionysus the god? After a distressing luncheon with Klaussen the lawyer at his formidable club, where he bullied me in a dining room filled with bullies, a scene from Daumier (I had been beaten down ten or twelve times, my suggestions all dismissed, and I had paid him a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer, but Klaussen hadn’t bothered yet to master the elementary facts of the case)—after lunch, I say, when we were walking through the lobby of the club, where federal judges, machine politicians, paving contractors, and chairmen of boards conferred in low voices, I heard a great noise. Workmen had torn down an entire wall. I said to the receptionist, “What’s happening?” She answered, “The entire club is being rewired. We’ve been having daily power failures from the old electrical system.” I said, “While they’re at it they might arrange to have people electrocuted in the dining room.”

I was notified by Klaussen next day that for one reason or another he could no longer represent me. I was an incompatible client.

The intellect of man declaring its independence from worldly power—okay. But I had gone to Klaussen for protection. I chose him because he was big and arrogant, like the guys my brother’s widow had hired. My late brother had swindled me. Did I want to recover my money or not? Was I fighting or doodling? Because in the courts you needed brazenness, it was big arrogance or nothing. And with Klaussen as with Mrs. Pergamon there was not a thing that Gerda could do—she couldn’t send either of them flowers or ask them to lunch. Besides, she was already sick. Dying, she was concerned about my future. She remonstrated with me. “Did you have to needle him? He’s a proud man.”

“I gave in to my weakness. What’s with me? Like, am I too good to be a hypocrite?”

“Hypocrisy is a big word…. A little lip service.”

And again I said what I shouldn’t have, especially given the state of her health: “It’s a short step from lip service to ass kissing.”

“Oh, my poor Herschel, you’ll never change!”

She was then dying of leukemia, Miss Rose, and I had to promise her that I would put my case in the hands of her brother Hansl. She believed that for her sake Hansl would be loyal to me. Sure, his feeling for her was genuine. He loved his sister. But as a lawyer he was a disaster, not because he was disloyal but because he was in essence an inept conniver. Also he was plain crackers.

Lawyers, lawyers. Why did I need all these lawyers? you will ask. Because I loved my brother fondly. Because we did business, and business can’t be done without lawyers. They have built a position for themselves at the very heart of money strength at the core of what is strongest. Some of the cheerfulest passages in Walish’s letter refer to my horrible litigation. He says, “I always knew you were a fool.” Himself, he took the greatest pains never to be one. Not that any man can ever be absolutely certain that his prudence is perfect. But to retain lawyers is clear proof that you’re a patsy. There I concede that Walish is right.

My brother, Philip, had offered me a business proposition, and that, too. was my fault. I made the mistake of telling him how much money my music-appreciation book had earned. He was impressed. He said to his wife, “Tracy, guess who’s loaded!” Then he asked, “What are you doing with it? How do you protect yourself against taxes and inflation?”

I admired my brother, not because he was a “creative businessman,” as they said in the family—that meant little to me—but because… Well, there is in fact no “because,” there’s only the given, a lifelong feeling, a mystery. His interest in my finances excited me. For once he spoke seriously to me, and this turned my head. I told him, “I never even tried to make money, and now I’m knee-deep in the stuff.” Such a statement was a little disingenuous. It was, if you prefer, untrue. To take such a tone was also a mistake, for it implied that money wasn’t so hard to make. Brother Philip had knocked himself out for it, while Brother Harry had earned heaps of it, incidentally, while fiddling. This, I now acknowledge, was a provocative booboo. He made a dark note of it. I even saw the note being made.

As a boy, Philip was very fat. We had to sleep together when we were children and it was like sharing the bed with a dugong. But since then he had firmed up quite a lot. In profile his face was large, with bags under the eyes, a sharp serious face upon a stout body. My late brother was a crafty man. He laid long-distance schemes. Over me he enjoyed the supreme advantage of detachment. My weakness was my fondness for him, contemptible in an adult male. He slightly resembled Spencer Tracy, but was more avid and sharp. He had a Texas tan, his hair was “styled,” not barbered, and he wore Mexican rings on every one of his fingers.

Gerda and I were invited to visit his estate near Houston. Here he lived in grandeur, and when he showed me around the place he said to me, “Every morning when I open my eyes I say, ‘Philip, you’re living right in the middle of a park. You own a whole park.’”

I said, “It certainly is as big as Douglas Park in Chicago.”

He cut me short, not wishing to hear about the old West Side, our dreary origins. Roosevelt Road with its chicken coops stacked on the sidewalks, the Tal-mudist horseradish grinder in the doorway of the fish store, or the daily drama of the Shawmut kitchen on Independence Boulevard. He abominated these reminiscences of mine, for he was thoroughly Americanized. On the other hand, he no more belonged on this Texas estate than I did. Perhaps no one belonged here. Numerous failed entrepreneurs had preceded him in this private park, the oilmen and land developers who had caused this monument to be built. You had the feeling that they must all have died in flophouses or on state funny farms, cursing the grandiose fata morgana that Philip now owned, or seemed to own. The truth was that he didn’t like it, either; he was stuck with it. He had bought it for various symbolic reasons, and under pressure from his wife.