Сол Беллоу - Dangling Man

"If you could see, what do you think you would see?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps that we were the feebleminded children of angels."

"Now you're just amusing yourself, Joseph."

"Very well, I would see where those capacities have gone to which we once owed our greatness."

"That would be tragic."

"I don't say it wouldn't be. Have you any tobacco?"

"No,"

"Or paper? If I had paper I could roll a cigarette out of these butts."

"I'm sorry I came empty-handed. If you're not alienatedWhy do you quarrel with so many people?

I know you're not a misanthrope. Is it because they force you to recognize that you belong to their world?"

"I was wrong, or else put it badly. I didn't say there was no feeling of alienation, but that we should not make a doctrine of our feeling."

"Is that a public or a private belief?88I don't understand you.88What about politics @8@?

"Do you want to discuss politics with me? With me? Now?"

"Since you refuse to subscribe to alienation, perhaps you might be interested in changing existence."

"Ha, ha, ha! Have you any ideas?"

"It's really not my place, you know @?

"I know, but you started it.88My position. You don't understand.88Oh, I do."

"So, about changing existence '@.

"I never enjoyed being a revolutionary."

"No? Didn't you hate anyone?"

"I hated, but I didn't enjoy. As a matter of fact "

"Yes-"

"You're so attentive-. I regarded politics as an in138 ferior activity. Plato tells us that if everything were as it should be, the best men would avoid office, not vie for it."

"They did once vie for it."

"They did. Public life is disagreeable.

It's forced on one."

"I often hear that complaint. But all this is neither here nor there as far as measures to be taken are concerned."

"But with whom, under what circumstances, how, towardwhat ends?"

"Ah, that's it, isn't it? With whom."

"You don't believe in the historic roles of classes, do you?"

"You keep forgetting. My province is…"

"Alternatives. Excuse me. With whom, to go on. A terrible, unanswerable question. With men dispersed into separate corners, incommunicado? One of their few remainingliberties is the liberty to wonder what will happen next."

"Still, if you had the power to see '@.

"Just to look in my coat for a cigarette; I may have left one there."

"If you could see it that way."

"There isn't a smoke in the house."

"Over-all @?

"You mean, if I were a political genius.

I'm not. Now what do you face?"

"What to do under the circumstances."

"Try to live."

"How?"

"Ttt @. is Raison zlussi, you're not giving much help. By a plan, a program, perhaps an obsession."

"An ideal construction."

"A German phrase. And you with a French name."

"I have to be above such prejudices."

"Well, it's a lovely phrase. An ideal construction, an obsessive device. There have been innumerable varieties: for study, for wisdom, bravery, war, the benefits of cruelty, for art; the God-man of the ancient cultures, the Humanistic full man, the courtly lover, the knight, the ecclesiastic, the despot, the ascetic, the millionaire, the manager. I could name hundreds of these ideal constructions, each with its assertions and symbols, each finding-in conduct, in God, in art, in money-its particular answer and each proclaiming: "This is the only possible way to meet chaos." Even someone like my friend Steidler is under the influence of an ideal construction of an inferior kind. It is inferior because it is loosely" made and littlo thought has gone into it.

Nevertheless it is real. He would willingly let go everything in his life that is not dramatic. Only he has, I am afraid, a shallow idea of drama.

Simple, inevitable things are not dramatic enough for him. He has a notion of the admirable style. It is poor stuff. Nobility of gesture is what he wants. And, for-all his boasted laziness. he is willing to pursue his ideal until his eyes burst from his head and his feet from his shoes."

"Do you want one of those constructions, Joseph?"

"Doesn't it seem that we need. them?"

"I don't know."

"Can't get along without them?"

"If you see it that way."

"Apparently we need to give ourselves some exclusive focus, passionate and engulfing."

"One might say that."

"But what of the gap between the ideal construction and the real world, the truth?"

"Yes, @, @.@?

"How are they related?"

"An interesting problem."

"Then there's this: the obsession exhausts the man.

It can become his enemy. It often does."

"H'm."

"What do you say to all this?"

"What do I say?"

"Yes, what do you think? You just sit there, looking at the ceiling and giving equivocal answers."

"I haven't answered I'm not supposed to give answers."

"No. What an inoffensive career you've chosen."

"You're forgetting to be reasonable."

"Reasonable! Go on, you make me sick. The sight of you makes me sick. You make me queasy at the stomach with your suave little, false little looks."

"Joseph, look here v, "Oh, get out. Get out of here. You're two-faced. You're not to be trusted, you damned diplomat, you cheat!"

Furious, I flung a handful of orange peel at him, and he fled the room.

February 4

Tnv. landlady, Mrs. Kiefer, had another stroke yesterday that paralyzed her legs. According to Mrs.

Bartlett, whom

Mrs. Briggs has engaged as a nurse, she can't live more than a few weeks. The windows are kept darkened; the halls and stairways smell of disinfectant, so that, going up to the landing with its stained-glass window, one imagines oneself in the hospital of a religious order. Except when Vanaker comes or goes, the house is quiet.

He still is noisy; he has not learned to close the door when he goes down the hall. To stop him, I have to come out and march threateningly toward the bathroom.

Thereupon he slams it shut. I have several times made general but loud and menacing remarks about decency and politeness. But he is either too drunk or too witless to change. When I do these things, I make myself ill. When I step out of the door to reprimand and stop him I am merely a nervous or irascible young man and I feel the force on me of a bad, harsh mood which I despise in others-the nastiness of a customer to a waiter or of a parent to a child. Iva is the same way. She gasps, "Oh, the fool!" when I go into the hall with a cross pull at the door. I suppose she means Vanaker; but may she not also mean me @?

February 5

Mr rRms. rer ill temper first manifested itself last winter. Before we moved out of our flat I had a disgraceful fist fight with the landlord, Mr.

Gesell.

That fight had been on the horizon a long time.

Throughout the summer we had been on good terms. We exerted ourselves to be courteous to Gesell and to Mrs.

Gesell, who made a daily racket in her shop downstairs with a machine-powered chisel. She was an amateur sculptress. Often the house trembled. Then she borrowed our books, and brought them back with stone dust on the pages. We did not complain.

But, when the frosts began, the house was underheated.

We could not bathe at night; in Iggecember we had to go to bed at nine, when the radiators turned cold. Then, during one week in lanuary, the furnace broke down. Mr. Gesell was an electrician himself; to save money, he undertook the repairs. But he had his job to attend to, so he worked at the furnace evenings and Sundays. The fireplace stifled us when we tried to use it, it was blocked with bricks. Below, Mrs. Gesell, surrounded by heat lamps, worked away at the figure of a sand hog she was designing for the new subwaynshe was going to enter a competition. When we went down to complain, she did not answer the bell. We ate supper with our sweaters on.