5. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 555-583

Chapter IX

Mrs. Renling's Pygmalion-like ambitions reach their full extent:  "she proposed to adopt me. I was supposed to become Augie Renling, live with them, and inherit all their dough."  Augie muses that there seems to have been "something adoptional about me," reasoning from the fact that the Einhorns had to make it clear that they didn't plan to make him a member of their family and thereby endanger the inheritance of their own son, Arthur. But he also recognizes the Renling plan as a challenge to his own identity: "Why should I turn into one of those people who didn't know who they themselves were?"

Mrs. Renling is so bent on the idea that she even tries to persuade him that it would make him attractive to the Fenchel daughters, which does tempt him for a moment until he realizes that Esther Fenchel probably would never have him. He reflects that it never seems to have occurred to Mrs. Renling that he might not want to be adopted: "she assumed, as if it were normal but not to be mentioned, something else: that, like everyone, I was self-seeking." But he turns her down: "I had family enough to suit me and history to be loyal to, not as though I had been gotten off of a stockpile." Finally she tells him that "if I refused my chance there was oblivion waiting for me instead; the wicked would get hold of me. I tried not to reject the truth in what I was told, and I had a lot of regard for the power of women to know it."

So he goes to see Einhorn for advice. But Einhorn has begun to rebuild his collapsed empire, and is now occupied with other matters, including a new mistress-secretary named Mildred Stark. "He gave it less than half his mind, thinking I was telling him the news that the Renlings wanted to adopt me, not that I considered refusing." Then while Augie is eating lunch downtown, he runs into an acquaintance named Clarence Ruber, who has a small shop on the South Shore that "dealt in lamps, pictures, vases, piano scarves, ashtrays and such bric-a-brac." Ruber has met an inventor of a new waterproof rubberized paint, and looking for someone to take his place in the shop. He thinks Augie would be the right man for the job.

So he makes his break with the Renlings and moves to the South Shore, not far from the nursing home where Grandma Lausch lives. He goes to visit her, but she seems barely to remember him. He realizes "how mall a part of her life compared with the whole span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be to the sides of an old varicose channel." He is shocked at her feebleness -- "Her we always thought so powerful and shockproof! It really threw me." He promises to come visit her again, but doesn't, and she dies that winter of pneumonia.

The new job doesn't go well, and Augie realizes that Ruber's partner in the shop wants him out, so he goes to work as a salesman for Ruber in the rubberized paint business. But Ruber puts him on commission rather than salary, and he finds it difficult to move the product. One of Einhorn's cousins agrees to take it, but "said he would never use it in any of his better establishments because it made a loud smell of rubber in the heat and moisture of the shower room." The drop in Augie's income puts Simon in a bind because Augie is unable to contribute to the support of their mother.

Augie's reputation as a clotheshorse begins to suffer: He's no longer able to afford cleaning and repairs for his clothing. His economies also take a toll on his morale. Then one day he runs into Joe Gorman, who had inveigled him into the robbery. Gorman has a new scheme: "Running immigrants over the border from Canada." It's not "legitimate," he tells Augie, but "it's a lot easier and safer" than robbery. Augie doesn't want to do it, but Gorman says he'll pay him fifty dollars to be his relief driver part of the way, and a hundred if he decides to continue. Augie decides there's nothing to be lost from the proposition, and agrees to go along and think about it on the road.

Gorman shows up in a souped-up black Buick, and they set out. When they reach Toledo, Augie takes his turn at the wheel, but Gorman is impatient because Augie drives too slowly and cautiously. Near Lackawanna they stop for gas, and Gorman sends Augie to buy some hamburgers to take with them. But as he is coming out of the restroom, Augie sees a state trooper examining the car. Gorman is nowhere to be seen. Fearing the worst, Augie slips out the back of the hamburger joint and sees Gorman heading toward the woods. He catches up with Gorman and sees that he has a gun. Gorman confesses that the car is stolen.

The trooper is looking for them, but they manage to get away. They decide to split up, and Gorman says he'll meet Augie in Buffalo the next day at nine o'clock. After they separate, however, Augie decides to make his way back to Chicago. Then he sees a group of men gathering for a protest march on Albany or Washington to demand a welfare increase, and hitches a ride that will take him into Buffalo after all. On the way they pass a squad car going in the other direction, with Gorman "sitting in the back seat between two troopers, with blood lines over his chin showing that he had probably tried to fight with them and they had opened up his lip."

When they reach the town, Augie gets a hotel room for the night, and after breakfast realizes that he doesn't have enough money left for a ticket back to Chicago. He telegraphs Simon to wire him some money, but by late afternoon realizes that Simon isn't going to respond to the request. So he takes a bus to Erie, thinking that it would be better not to stay on the road in New York, just in case the troopers are looking for him. He spends the night in a flophouse, then starts hitchhiking the next day. But there are so many hitchhikers on the road that he has no success.

He keeps walking, and at a railroad crossing near Ashtabula he manages to hop a freight train that takes him to Cleveland. He hears from the other "non-paying passengers" that there is an express freight getting ready to go to Toledo, and he joins a mob of men that rush for the freight when it gets under way. He finds himself with three others, "a lean, wolfy man," a boy called Stoney, and a black man. But the train doesn't go to Toledo after all. It stops at Lorain, where the boy joins up with him as they look for a place to spend the night.

On the sidings we found some boxcars retired from service, of great age, rotten and swollen, filled with old paper and straw, a cheesy old hogshead stink of cast-off things such as draws rats, a marly or fungus white on the walls. There we bedded down in the refuse.

Others join them during the night, and Augie finds himself being approached by a man for sex, so he moves away from him.

It takes Augie five days to make his way back to Chicago because he gets on a train to Detroit by mistake. He and Stoney are kicked  off of that train twenty miles outside of Detroit, and as they are looking for a ride they are joined by the "wolf-looking man" that had been with them on the earlier train. The three of them catch a ride on a truck that takes them into Detroit, where Augie hopes to get a bus to Chicago with the little money he has left. But as they are walking toward the center of town, a squad car picks them up.

Augie is afraid he has been spotted in connection with Gorman, but they have really been picked up on suspicion of being members of "the Foley gang," which steals auto parts from wrecking yards. After interrogation, an old man is brought in who recognizes Wolfy as having been jailed there three years ago. They are all jailed overnight.

I must say I didn't get any great shock from this of personal injustice. I wanted to be out and on my way, and that was nearly all. I suffered over Joe Gorman, caught and beat. However, as I felt on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness. It is for everyone. You don't, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a barbershop "September Morn." Nor are lowered into it with visitor's curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the banks. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who very well know where they are.

The next morning Augie and Stoney are released. They take a trolley to the city limits, where Augie is awakened by the conductor to tell him he needs to transfer. When he gets off he realizes that Stoney is still asleep on the car, but he's unable to wake him. He takes the connecting trolley to the end of the line where he waits, hoping that Stoney has figured out how to catch up with him. "I felt despondent that I had lost him."

Finally, he starts to hitchhike, getting a ride into Jackson where he finds a cheap flophouse. The next day he is picked up by a salesman for a film company who takes him to Chicago.

3. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 477-524

Chapter VI


Like so many of Bellow's protagonists, Augie is afflicted with a certain aimlessness. Henderson, for example, "wants" but doesn't seem to be able to specify what it is that he wants. So Augie observes, "My brother Simon wasn't much my senior, and he and others at our age had already got the idea there was a life to lead and had chosen their directions, while I was circling yet." Einhorn doesn't make it easier for him, because "what I was to get from him wasn't at all clear. I know I longed very much, but I didn't understand for what."

So he lingers on the fringe of the Einhorn family, watching the course their lives take. Dingbat decides to become the manager of a heavyweight fighter named Nails Nagel. "And it was just what he needed, to make speeches (his brother was a lodge and banquet orator) and to drag Nails out of his room in the morning for road work." Not that he was much good at being a manager: "Nails had won two fights in six." And the fight game ended when Nails got seasick on Lake Michigan before a fight in Muskegon and is flattened in the third round. Dingbat had been counting on a purse for the fight and is broke, so he, Nails, and Augie have to hitchhike their way back to Chicago.

While Augie is away with Dingbat and the fighter, there is a fire at the Einhorn residence that destroys the living room. It seems to have been set by Einhorn as an insurance scam, because "he had insured himself with the copany that got most of his business" and Mrs. Einhorn had been wanting to redecorate. Among the items ruined by the fire was a set of Harvard Classics whose covers had been damaged by the fire extinguisher; Augie gets those.

Unfortunately, Augie doesn't get much peace at home for reading because Grandma Lausch "had become loose in the wires and very troublesome, with the great weaknesses of old age." Because Simon is working downtown, Augie has to take over cleaning responsibilities, which are complicated by Grandma's new, unhousebroken puppy. And Augie's mother is unable to go to visit Georgie alone because of her eyesight, so he and Simon have to go with her. Georgie is getting too old for the boys' institution, so they are facing the probability that he will have to move to one of the institutions for adults downstate.

Grandma's increasing debility also becomes a burden on their mother, especially with her own worsening sight problems. Simon puts it bluntly. "She's been riding Ma for years and put on the ritz at our expense. Well, Ma can't do it anymore. If the Lausches want to hire a housekeeper, that's a fair way to settle it, but if they don't they're going to have to take her out of here." He writes to the son in Racine to this effect, and as a result, the sons arrange for Grandma to move into "the Nelson Home for the Aged and Infirm."  Grandma boasts about how splendid the facility is, and supervises the packing and the move with her usual authoritarian manner. Augie, who has been taught by Dingbat how to drive, borrows a car from Einhorn and takes her there. The facility is not the millionaire's mansion that Grandma claimed it was, but rather an old apartment house, a dumping-ground for worn-out American lives:

We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes, and with the strains of kitchen toil, Far West digging, Cincinnati retailing, Omaha slaughtering, peddling, harvesting, laborious or pegging enterprise from whale-sized to infusorial that collect into the labor of the nation.

Grandma doesn't show any signs of disappointment in the actuality of the place, of course, but she treats Augie with harsh indifference. "I knew she needed to be angry and dry if she was to avoid weeping. She must have cried as soon as I left, for she wasn't so rattlebrained by old age that she didn't realize what her sons had done to her." She gives him "an angry quarter" when he leaves.

Age is taking its toll at the Einhorns' too. The Commissioner is dying. Augie notes the effect on William Einhorn: "you could see how much he had been protected by the Commissioner. After all, he became a cripple at a young age. Whether before or after marriage I never did find out." He begins to devote himself to assuming his father's part of the business, giving up his own schemes and projects. From him, Augie learns "the lessons and theories of power."

After the Commissioner's funeral, Augie helps Einhorn sort through the papers in his father's room, destroying some, saving others. Einhorn becomes aware of how much of his father's business was a matter of goodwill transactions with cronies. "It was the opening indication that the Commissioner had not left him as strong as he believed, but subject to the honor of logts of men he hadn't always treated well. He became worried and thoughtful."

Chapter VII

The 1929 Wall Street crash happens not long after the Commissioner's death, and "Einhorn was among the first to be wiped out." He even loses the building in which he lives, though he retains the poolroom, and takes over managing it, setting up his office there. But he claims that the loss is not so bad for him: "I was a cripple before and am now. Prosperity didn't make me walk, and if anybody knew what a person is liable to have happen to him, it's William Einhorn."

Augie is "a luxury," and has to be let go. He gets a job as an "apprentice soda jerk." The family savings are lost when the bank closed. Simon goes to "the municipal college, with the idea that everyone had then of preparing for one of the Civil-Service examinations." Simon has a trustworthy look that stands him in good stead, "a lifted look of unforgiving, cosmological captaincy; that look where honesty has the strength of a prejudice." Augie, on the other hand, gets mixed up in a robbery.

He is still hanging with Jimmy Klein and Clem Tambow, but in the poolroom he meets Joe Gorman, who has done time in jail for car theft, and has a plot to rob a leather-goods store. His accomplice is Sailor Bulba, whom Augie knows from school. They would break into the store and steal the handbags, and a fence named Jonas would sell them. Augie acts as lookout, but when he gets home after the robbery, he is conscience-stricken about what he has done. He tells Gorman that he won't take part in any more robberies.   

But Einhorn hears about it and is angry. He takes Augie aside in the poolroom and tells him, "if I hear of you on another job I'm going to have you thrown out of here. You'll never see the inside of this place or Tillie and me again. If your brother knew about this, by Jesus Christ! he'd beat you. I know he would." He frightens Augie by asking if Gorman had a gun, and describes a scenario in which the police arrive and Gorman shoots a cop. Then he tells Augie something about himself that Augie acknowledges to be true: "You've got opposition in you. You don't slide through everything. You just make it look so." And he warns Augie against falling "into the first trap life digs for you." He's a "setup" for a fatal mistake that could blight his life. He also adds, "'I don't ask you to take me for your model either,' too well realizing the contradiction, that I knew about his multifarious swindles.... 'But I'm not a lowlife when I think, and really think,' he said. 'In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.'"

In the end, Einhorn hires Augie again, not just to keep him out of trouble, but because he needs his help. He pays him less money, though. One of his first jobs, ironically, is helping Einhorn swindle a gangster, Nosey Mutchnik. Einhorn goes in as partner with Mutchnik in buying a piece of property that in fact Einhorn already owns. Einhorn makes more than four hundred dollars on the deal, although if Mutchnik "had found out he would have shot Einhorn or had him shot."

Einhorn's wife, Tillie, runs the lunch counter in the poolroom, managing to stay aloof from the raucous behavior and obscene talk. There are fewer women in her husband's life now, because of the poolroom. Lottie Fewter has left, though Einhorn keeps track of her up until the time 'when she was shot by a teamster-lover, the father of several children, whom she got involved in black marketing. He was caught, and there was prison coming to him, and no rap for her. Therefore he killed her." Einhorn's reaction to the murder:

"They say she was getting sloppy toward the end, and greedy about money. That was bad. There's trouble enough from fucking. She was made to have a violent thing happen to her. The world doesn't let hot blood off easy." 

When Augie graduates from high school, Mrs. Einhorn comes to the ceremony.  Afterward, he drives her back to the poolroom, where Einhorn says he's going to take Augie to a show. He's supposed to go to a party at the Kleins', but he says he can arrive late. But instead of driving Einhorn downtown, he's instructed to go somewhere that Einhorn has never been to before: a brothel. When they get there, Augie takes Einhorn on his back to the third floor.

He used to talk about himself as the Old Man of the Sea riding Sinbad. But there was Aeneas too, who carried his old dad Anchises in the burning of Troy, and that old man had been picked by Venus to be her lover, which strikes me as the better comparison.

He tells Augie to pick out any girl he wants, but when the madam enters and sees the crippled Einhorn on Augie's back, she's surprised. But he hands her a card from someone who had arranged the visit but apparently forgot to tell her about Einhorn's condition. He takes Einhorn to a room -- "this was a better-class place as I was later to know by contrast" -- where a woman is waiting for him, and gives Augie his wallet for safekeeping. Then he sends Augie away. His own prostitute is waiting for him in the parlor.

As always with strangers, I behaved as if I knew exactly what I was doing and from an idea that at a critical time it was best and most decent to have my own momentum. She did not take this away from me.... She wasn't young -- the women had made the right choice for me -- and she had sort of a crude face; but she encouraged me to treat her lover-like... I knew later that I had been lucky with her, that she had tried not to be dry with me, or satirical, and done it mercifully.... Paying didn't matter. Nor using what other people used. That's what city life is.  

                          

2. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 430-476

Chapter IV

Unlike Holden Caulfield, Augie March is very much into that David Copperfield kind of crap. "All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and they were there to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself." It's the Dickensian color and variety of the secondary and minor characters that give Bellow's novel its special texture. (Dickens would certainly have named a character Five Properties, if he'd thought of it.)

As for Augie, he has, as he says, "a very weak sense of consequences," which allows him to overlook Grandma Lausch's warning, "The Klein boy is going to get you into trouble. He has thievish eyes. The truth now -- is he a crook or not? Aha! He doesn't answer." Pushed into answering, Augie says "No," even though "at this very time we were engaged in a swindle in Deever's neighborhood department store." Augie and Jimmy Klein are high school sophomores working as Santa Claus's elves in the toy department. They are skimming quarters from the change people give them for the Christmas surprise packages they sell out of a barrel for two bits apiece. They're convinced that the cashier to whom they give the money won't notice what they're doing, and they have saved up enough to buy presents for their families and friends. Of course they get caught. "There wasn't just threatening and scolding this time but absolute abasement." They have to return the presents and repay the money, and Jimmy gets a beating from his father.

Then Augie falls in love with Hilda Novinson, the daughter of a tailor, and gets ribbed by Jimmy's cousin, Clem Tambow, who tells him, "Let me take you once to a whore, and you'll forget all about her." It doesn't help matters that he's out of work during the time when he'd like to be taking Hilda out on dates, but he finally gets a job in a flower shop, making deliveries to funerals and wakes for a man named Bluegren, who is chummy with Chicago's gangsters.

Meanwhile, Grandma is gearing up for a coup: persuading Augie's mother that his brother Georgie should be institutionalized. "Sooner or later something had to be done about him, said the old woman. He was hard to manage, now he was growing so tall and beginning to look like a man." She awakens the fear that a post-pubescent Georgie might take liberties with a girl, and the police would be called in. She brings out her old criticism of the Marches: "we refused to see where our mistakes were leading, and then the terrible consequences came on." Augie and his mother argue against her to no avail.

She didn't have to win Simon over; in this one matter of Georgie he was with her. He wasn't openly going to join her because of his feeling for Mama, but when we were alone in the bedroom he let me make all my accusations and arguments, waiting me out with a superior face, taking it easy full-length on the sheets -- sewed together of Ceresota sacks -- and when he thought I was ready to hear him he said, "Tell it to the Marines, kid." 

Simon and Augie have gone separate ways after he lost his job at the train station and then got busted for skimming at Deever's. He doesn't much like Jimmy, and he makes fun of Augie's infatuation with Hilda: "Friedl Coblin'll be better looking than that when she grows up. She'll probably have tits anyhow." So Augie is not surprised that Simon takes Grandma's side against him. So the matter with Georgie is settled, and he is sent to the institution for retarded children.

After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we mere a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame.

As a symbol of Grandma's decreasing control over the March household, her old dog Winnie dies in May of that year.

Chapter V

In his junior year of high school, Augie goes to work for William Einhorn, a wealthy quadriplegic and "the first superior man I knew." The Einhorns "were the most important real-estate brokers in the district and owned and controlled much property, including the enormous forty-flat building where they lived." His father, known as the Commissioner, is the head of the business. William has a younger brother "who was called Shep or, by his poolroom friends, Dingbat.... I couldn't exactly say how he came by the name." Dingbat had run the poolroom, Einhorn's Billiards, but was replaced when the Commissioner found him "unreliable."

Seeing Augie carry a glass on a tray for the Einhorns, Simon said, "So this is your job! You're the butler."

But it was only one function of hundreds, some even more menial, more personal, others calling for cleverness and training -- secretary, deputy, agent, companion. He was a man who needed someone beside him continually; the things that had to be done for him made him autocratic.

Occasionally Augie is called on to dress Einhorn or to take him to the toilet. He reads the newspaper to him and maintains files of clippings and correspondence.

William's son, Arthur, is a sophomore at the University of Illinois. "Einhorn had a teaching turn similar to Grandma Lausch's, both believing they could show what could be done with the world, where it gave or resisted, where you could be confident and run or where you could only feel you way and were forced to blunder. And with his son at the university I was the only student he had to hand." Augie learns about Einhorn's "numerous small swindles," such as "ordering things on approval he didn't intend to pay for" and using fictitious names.  He sent away for anything offered for free and kept it all. He entered contests and occasionally won, and has a project "to put out an edition of Shakespeare indexed as the Gideon Bible was: Slack Business, Bad Weather, Difficult Customers, Stuck with Big Inventory of Last Year's Models, Woman, Marriage, Partners." He also published "a mimeographed paper called 'The Shut-In,'" full of inspirational and sentimental matter filched from various sources.

"I was a listener by upbringing," Augie says, and Einhorn's peculiar erudition fills his head. Yet he also maintains a distance from the family, though he sometimes gets a suspicious look from Mrs Einhorn. "I wasn't trying to worm my way into any legacy and get any part of what was coming to her elegant and cultivated son Arthur." Einhorn, too, assures him, "I don't know what brain power you've got; you're too frisky yet, and even if you turn out to be smart you'll never be in the class of my son Arthur." Augie feels a little "stung" by the comparison. But he feels honored to be accepted by Einhorn, whose brother and wife both regard him as a wizard.

Mrs. Einhorn turns something of a blind eye to her husband's dalliance with other women -- apparently his paralysis is not complete -- such as a family employee, Lottie Fewter. Einhorn says that in this way he is like his father, the Commissioner, who "petted and admired all women and put his hands wherever he liked." He tells Augie that he used to believe he would either overcome his disability or commit suicide, but now he just manages to live with it most of the time:

"You can get along twenty-nine days with your trouble, but there's always that thirtieth day when goddammit you can't, when you feel like the stinking fly in the first cold snap, when you look about and think you're the Old Man of the Sea locked around Sinbad's neck, and why should anybody carry a piece of envious human junk? If society had any sense they'd give me euthanasia or leave me the way the Eskimos do their old folks in an igloo with food for two days." 

Meanwhile, Augie is putting the moves on Lottie "in the kitchen while she was ironing.... We soon were kissing and feeling; she now held off my hands and now led them inside her dress, alleging instruction, boisterous that I was still cherry, and at last, from kindness, she one day said that if I'd come back in the evening I could take her home." But then she sends word that she's changed her mind, and Jimmy's cousin Clem reminds Augie that she belongs to his boss -- and a couple of other guys. And that Augie doesn't have any money.

Augie begins hanging out with Dingbat, going to some pretty rough places where people like to pick fights on the slightest provocation. Dingbat rescues Augie from some threatened encounters, which is fine with Augie, who has no interest in putting up a fight. Einhorn himself comments on the general lawlessness of Chicago:

"But there is some kind of advantage in the roughness of a place like Chicago, of not having any illusions either. Whereas in all the great capitals of the world there's some reason to think humanity is very different. All that ancient culture and those beautiful works of art right out in public, by Michelangelo and Christopher Wren, and those ceremonies, like trooping the color at the Horse Guards' parade or burying a great man in the Pantheon over in Paris. You see those marvelous things and you think that everything savage belongs to the past. So you think. And then you have another think, and you see that after they rescued women from the coal mines, or pulled down the Bastille and got rid of Star Chambers and lettres de cachet, ran out the Jesuits, increased education, and built hospitals and spread courtesy and politeness, they have five or six years of war and revolutions and kill off twenty million people. And do they think there's less danger to life here? That's a riot."

1. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 383-429

Chapter I

Bellow's stories exist against a background. Often (as in Herzog or Mr. Sammler's Planet) it's a densely textured background of ideas, theories of history, or the like. In Henderson the Rain King it's a background of a richly imagined but wholly fictive Africa. And in Augie March the initial background is Chicago, as richly imagined but not perhaps as fictive as Henderson's Africa -- the Chicago of the Twenties and the Depression Thirties, the Chicago of Bellow's childhood and youth.

Augie introduces us to the Marches, such as they are. His mother, he tells us, is "simple-minded." It's not entirely clear what that means, but we gather that she is generally ineffectual in most areas of life. His younger brother, Georgie, "was born an idiot" -- and that seems to be in the traditional 19th- and early 20th-century sense of the word: mentally retarded. Whether this has some connection with his mother's "simple-mindedness" isn't clear, but Augie and his older brother, Simon, seem to be normally, even highly intelligent. Their father isn't in the picture at all, though "sometimes money from my father came and sometimes it didn't."

The dominant figure in the household, then, is Grandma Lausch, who isn't really their grandmother, or even a relative, but a boarder who coddles an aged poodle named Winnie, "a pursy old overfed dog." Augie tells us, "Mama was Winnie's servant, as she was Grandma Lausch's." Grandma helps Mama manage the various social agencies that supply their income, being "one of those Machiavellis of small street and neighborhood that my young years were full of." Augie, who "loved a piece of strategy," becomes Grandma's apt pupil.

Grandma is "the widow of a powerful Odessa businessman," and she is supported by two sons, one in Cincinnati and one in Racine, Wisconsin. Her daughters-in-law don't want her, but Grandma is happy to live with the Marches "because for so many years she was used to direct a house, to command, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise, and intrigue." Augie claims to remember his father, but really only imagines him from what little he has been able to glean from Simon's recollections and other mentions of him by their mother. His leaving them left a vacuum that Grandma was destined to fill: "I don't know how [Mama] made out before, when we were alone after the desertion, but Grandma came and put a regulating hand on the family life."

Grandma also supervises the boys' education, buying a set of Encyclopedia Americana from the junk dealer and making Augie and Simon read it. She sends Augie to the library for her own books, in Russian, teaching him the Russian alphabet so he can read the titles. "Once a year she read Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin," and she scolds Augie if he brings her anything that isn't a novel. She raises the boys on "kitchen religion," her idiosyncratic version of Judaism, for "although she never went to the synagogue, ate bread on Passover, sent Mama to the pork butcher where meat was cheaper, loved canned lobster and other forbidden food, she was not an atheist and free thinker." Sometimes the boys are "chased, stoned, bitten, and beat up for Christ-killers" by the Polish Christian boys in the neighborhood, but Augie "never had any special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and boisterous to take it to heart."

Chapter II

At twelve, Augie tells us, he was "farmed out" for summer work, though even before that he had distributed handbills for a theater owned by a friend of Grandma's, a man named Sylvester. It was Sylvester's son, "a young fellow whom money or family anxiety always seemed to keep in a sweat," who ran things, and who warned Augie, "I've had kids who shoved the bills down the sewer. Too bad if I ever find out about it, and I have ways to check up." So naturally, Augie says, "I felt I couldn't do less either and watched for my chance."

The next summer, Simon went to work as a bellhop in Michigan, and Augie was sent to help his cousin Hyman Coblin with his newspaper route. He had to live with the Coblins because they were more than half an hour away on the streetcar. He took the room formerly used by Howard Coblin, who had run away to join the Marines and fight the rebels in Nicaragua, the source of continual mourning by his mother, Anna. The Coblins had a daughter, Friedl, whom Anna was convinced Augie should marry when they were older: "Hear, Owgie, you'll be my son, my daughter's husband, mein kind." This also meant that Augie would be a kind of replacement for Howard.

Also part of the Coblins' household is Anna's brother, known as "Five Properties," a huge dairyman who during World War I had driven "wagons of Russian and German corpses to burial on Polish farms." He seems to have gotten his nickname from his resemblance to a character in the Yiddish theater: "the fat swagger of the suitor everybody hated: 'Five prope'ties. Plente money.'"

Augie likes the Coblins, who were generous to him. But their house is filthy, as he realizes when he goes home on the half-days he has off. He is "troubled ... to see how absent Simon and I could be from the house and how smooth it went without us." Grandma Lausch makes fun of the Coblins, but she is also engaged in trying to find an American girl for Five Properties to marry, so that she can collect a matchmaker's fee.

Augie gets up with Coblin between four and five in the morning to meet the newspaper delivery trucks and to get the papers ready for the delivery boys, "Coblin and his older hands taking the steep back porches where you needed the knack of pitching the paper up to the third floor over the beams and clotheslines." On Saturdays, Coblin would give money to take Friedl to the movies. Anna observed the holy days, and tries to give Augie some religious instruction.

Chapter III

Grandma took it on herself to help Simon and Augie make something of themselves, even without the advantages of "her own sons with the German governesses and tutors and gymnasium uniforms they had had." She resents the fact that her sons "weren't so enormously grateful for all she had done. Perhaps she worked so hard over Simon and me to show them what she could do even with such handicaps as ours."

Simon had a distinguished record here. President of the Loyal League, he wore the shield on his sweater, and was valedictorian. I didn't have his singleness of purpose but was more diffuse, and anybody who offered entertainment could get me to skip and do the alleys for junk, or prowl the boathouse and climb in the ironwork under the lagoon bridge. My marks showed it, and the old lady would give me a going-over when I brought them in, calling me "cat-head" and, in her French, "meshant," threatening that I'd go to work at fourteen.

She disapproved of his friends, and meted out punishments for his constant offenses. "And I wasn't unaffected by her nagging. I didn't want to go out at fourteen with a certificate and work in the packing plants, so occasionally, for a spell, I'd pick up; I'd do my homework and almost climb out of my seat, wagging my arm with zeal to answer questions." He skipped a grade when Simon graduated and was valedictorian, so she told him, "I want to see you up there next year." But he "wasn't cut out for it."

Simon begins to backslide after he graduated, and when he comes back from waiting tables in the summer with very little money, he is scolded for it. He and Augie go to work together unpacking crates in the cellar of Woolworth's, and then Simon gets a job working a concession stand in the railroad station. He also rebels against Grandma, telling Augie, "She's really nothing to us, you know that, don't you?"  He begins reporting on the celebrities he sees in the train station, with the sense that he might be their equal one day. Finally, after months of pressure from Grandma, Simon finds Augie a job in the train station, too, but he is fired because he can't make his cash come out evenly. He complains that he was shortchanged by people who grabbed a paper and flung down the money, and he couldn't leave the stand to chase them down. Simon asks, "You couldn't get that money out of somebody else's change, could you?" Augie complains that Simon never taught him that trick. And Simon doesn't stand up for Augie when Grandma yells at him.

Augie looks for another job with his friend Jimmy Klein, of whom Grandma disapproves. Jimmy "was highly sociable and spirited, slight and dark-faced, narrow-eyed, witty-looking, largely willing to be honest but not overstrapped by conscience -- the old lady was right about that." They cut school frequently to go to the theater, and are often seen by Coblin in the theater lines, but he doesn't tell Grandma.

Jimmy's uncle Tambow is "a pretty big wheel in Republican ward politics," and when he comes across a lot of cheap goods -- "like lost articles in the post office or distressed goods in a bankruptcy" -- he sets up a stand on Milwaukee Avenue and has Jimmy and Augie run it. He would "put in a fix with the cops so we wouldn't be bothered."