Сол Беллоу - Dangling Man

Here she fled.

"Ethel said it was nasty of me, but the woman was so serious I could not resist joking. I didn't think it would lose me the commission."

He still has his job with the advertising agency, drawing "cartoon faces of bilious men and headachy office girls." And that, he goes on, serious all at once, "is the adult, commonsense, wise world. I am exhilarated by the tremendous unimportance of my work. It is nonsense. My employers are nonsensical. The job therefore leaves me free. There's nothing to it.

In a way it's like getting a piece of bread from a child in return for wiggling your ears. It is childish.

I am the only one in this fifty-three-story building who knows how childish it is. Everybody else takes it seriously. Because this is a fifty-three-story building, they think it must be serious "This is life!" I say, this is pish, nonsense, nothing! The real world is the world of art and of thought. There is only one worth-while sort of work, that of the imagination."

It is an attractive idea, it confers a sort of life on him, sets him off from the debased dullness of those fifty-three stories. He is not making this up. I know him. He has no reason to lie to me. He is telling me what he feels: that he has escaped a trap. That really is a victory to celebrate. I am fascinated by it, and a little jealous. He can maintain himself. Is it because he is an artist? I believe it is. Those acts of the imagination save him. But what about me? I have no talent for that sort of thing. My talent, if I have one at all, is for being a citizen, or what is today calle. d, most apologetically, a good man.

Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute for the imagination?

That, I am unable to answer. But certainly he is better off. There he is in New York, painting; and in spite of the calamity, the lies and moral buggery, the odium, the detritus of wrong and sorrow dropped on every heart, in spite of these, he can keep a measure of cleanliness and freedom.

Besides, those acts of the imagination are in the strictest sense not personal. Through them he is connected with the best part of mankind. He feels this and he can" never be isolated, left aside, lie has a community. I have this six-sided box. And goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail. My perspectives end in the walls. Nothing Of "the future comes to me. Only the past, in its shabbiness and innocence. Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me.

When the Italian General Bergonzoli (i think it was Bergonzoli) was captured in Libya, he would not discuss military matters or the strategy that led to his defeat, but said, "Please!

I am not a soldier. I am primarily a poet!" Who does not recognize the advantage of the artist, these days?

January 11

THE OTHER night Ira was searching through the shelves for a book she had put away months before and was musing aloud about its disappearance.

I was trimming my nails, listening absently, guiding the tiny crescent shears away from the quick, and was, as I can become in small matters, preoccupied with the gathering up of the clippings, when suddenly I remembered that I had lent Kitty Daumler a book.

"What did you say you were looking for?"

"Didn't you hear me before? A small, blue book, Dub- liners. Have you seen it?"

"It must be around."

"Help me look."

"It's probably buried among the others. Why don't you read anothe book? There're plenty."

But Ira would not be so easily dissuaded. She went on searching, piling books on the floor near my chair. "You won't find it," I said after a time.

"Why not?"

"These things have a way of dropping out of sight and turning up months later. It may have fallen behind the case."

"Let's move it."

"Not I. Next time Marie holds a general cleaning." I picked up the clippings in pinches and threw them into the wastebasket. "I ought to bury them, by rights."

"Those? Why?" She stood up, in her blue figured wrap, to ease her back against the wall. "I can't stay bent over very long. Old age."

"Nails, hair, all cuttings and waste from the body. Fear of sorcery."

"The door's been locked for days; he couldn't have taken it. Anyhow, what would he do with Dubliners?"'"

"Vanaker?"

"Yes." Ira was still sure he was responsible for the disappearance of her perfume bottles. I'll dig the book up tomorrow," I said. "But it should be here."

"Very well, it should. But if it's not, it won't appear, no matter how determined you are."

"You mean it isn't in the room?"

"I'm not saying that."

"Then "I meart you'd rather waste an evening looking for it than read another book."

She said indignantly: "You told me to read it yourself. You insisted."

"But that was long ago, months and months ago. You should have read it in a few hours."

"Yes," she said. "And it's months and months since you took an interest in me. Lately, for all you care, I might just as well not be here. You pay no attention to what I say. If I didn't come home for a week you wouldn't miss me."

I received this charge in silence. "Well?" she said aggressively. "

"Ah, that's all foolishness."

"That's no sort of answer."

"Iva, it's this situation we're in. It's changed us both. But it isn't permanent."

"You mean you'll go away soon, and that'll be the end of it."

"Ohea8I said, irritated, "don't nag. It is the situation. You know it is."

"It certainly has changed you."

"Of course it has; it would change anyone."

Rising, I took my coat from the hanger and went to the door.

"Where are you going?"

"To get some air. It's stuffy here."

"Can't you see it's raining? But I suppose even that's better than spending the evening with a nagging wife."

"Right, it is better!" I exclaimed. I had no more patience. "For ten cents they'll bunk me in a flophouse, no questions asked. You needn't expect me back tonight."

"That's right, advertise to the entire house '@.@?

"It's just like you to worry about the house. Damn the house. It's more shameful to act this way than that the house should know. I don't give a bloody damn about the house!"

"Joseph!" she said.

I shut the door with a crash, already aware, under my anger, that this was beneath me and altogether out of proportion to the provocation. I pulled my hat down against the rain. Our windows, with their glowing shades, set two orange rectangles, trade-marks of warmth and comfort, against the downpour and the dark, the glitter of the trees, the armor of ice on the street. The intense cold of the past week had lifted. Fog had succeeded it, rising in spongy gray blooms from the soaked walks, hovering in the yards and over the hollows blinking with rain and changes of color from the muffled signal lights-comgreen, amber, red, amber, green, shuttering down the street. Mr.

Vanaker's window went up. He threw a bottle, using the neck as a hilt. It landed softly into the clay, beside the others; there were dozens of bottles among the bushes, their high shoulders streaming as though drops of mercury were falling on them from the withes. The window was run down hastily.

My shoes, their once neat points scuffed and turned up, squashed, as I walked, through half-a-dozen leaks. I moved toward the corner, inhaling the odors of wet clothes and of wet coal, wet paper, wet earth, drifting with the puffs of fog. Low, far out, a horn ttered a dull cry, subsided; again.

The street lamp bent over the curb like a woman who cannot turn homeward until she has found the ring or the coin she dropped in the ice and gutter silt.