8. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 655-708

Chapter XII

When cold weather comes, Simon starts making money and gets married -- officially. Augie, outfitted in his tuxedo, picks up his mother in Simon's Pontiac for the ceremony and takes her to the ostentatious hotel where the wedding is to take place, though he is somewhat underwhelmed by its luxury.

I know that I in, say, an ancient place like Venice or in Rome, passing along the side of majestic walls where great men once sat, experienced what it was to be simply a dot, a speck that scans across the cornea, a corpuscle, almost white, almost nothing but air.... But in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn't nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great -- the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won't serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy.

He has, however, fallen in step with Simon's plans: for him to marry Lucy Magnus, "who had more money even than Charlotte," to work for Simon, who will pay his tuition while he finishes pre-law at the university and then goes to John Marshall law school at night. "Eventually I could become his partner. Or if his business didn't suit me, we could go into real estate with our joint capital. Or perhaps into manufacturing." Simon even hints at the possibility of going into politics, noting that Henry Horner, who is Jewish, has become governor of Illinois. "He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits." 

Simon's exercise in power sometimes becomes overbearing, as when he tries to take his mother's cane away from her at that wedding, claiming that it will mar the photographs. She resists, however, and Augie "approved of Mama's exhibition of will, wondering at the surprises the meek will pull." Simon has invited the Einhorns to the wedding, as well as Five Properties and his wife, Simon's former girlfriend, Cissy, "partly to show Cissy what he had gone out to do and also to subject Five Properties to a cruel comparison. At the reception, Five Properties makes a bit of a scene "because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar." Augie is uncertain who made this arrangement: Simon or Charlotte.

Augie has grown used to the idea of marrying Lucy Magnus, who looks at him "in her unambiguously declarative way" during the ceremony -- they have been paired off as groomsman and bridesmaid. "In some way, not the deepest nor yet trivially, I was gone on her and as far as I was allowed gave her a real embrace that she returned, licking my ear and praising and promising me; she already called me her husband." He hasn't yet gained the family's full confidence, however. "I was, as at the Renlings', under an influence and not the carrier of it."

At the coal yard, Simon drives Augie hard. He is also convinced that Augie is having an affair with Mimi Villars. But he's okay with that as long as it's just sex, knowing that it will help keep Augie from trying to persuade Lucy Magnus to sleep with him. But Simon's controlling nature also gets him in trouble at the coal yard when he gets into a fight with a dealer named Guzynski whose truck breaks down and causes a jam of other trucks that extends out into the seat. Simon pulls a gun on Guzynski, who is drunk, and pistol-whips him. Guzynski leaves and, afraid that he'll call the cops, Simon calls his friend on the force, Lt. Nuzzo, who has Guzynski locked up pre-emptively. "Nuzzo, or Nuzzo's people, had put a deep fright him in their cellar below cellar," and Guzynski stays on his best behavior thereafter. At Christmas, Simon sends Guzynski a bottle of gin and his wife a box of candy. "Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how badly, by contrast -- because of chicken-heartedness -- I did.

Augie grows so obsessed with trying to stay on Simon's good side, that "Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly. 'Brother! things must be bad for you,' she said, 'if that's all you dream.'" One night, late for a date with Lucy, Augie has a minor traffic accident, breaking the taillights on Simon's Pontiac. He is so shaken by it that Lucy notices: "She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the damage -- as he did -- and what's more, no point of view but his seemed possible to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one." When Simon does raise hell, Augie replies:

"What are you fussing about? It wasn't much of an accident, and you're insured." This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were dragging by the wires, and it wasn't so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded.

One evening Mimi Villars comes to his room with the news that she's pregnant. Her lover, Frazer, is out of town, and she wants to have an abortion before he returns. One of the waitresses she works with has given her the name of a doctor who is said to have an injection that will take care of it. Augie is skeptical about anything so untried, and asks why she doesn't have the baby. She scoffs at the idea of herself as a mother, and taunts Augie with the notion that he objects to the abortion because "you wouldn't be here if your mother had ideas like mine. Nor your brothers either." Why should she go through with the pregnancy?

"So the souls of these things shouldn't get after me when I die and accuse me of not letting them be born? I'd tell them, 'Listen, stop haunting me. What do you think you ever were? Why a kind of little scallop, that's all. You don't know how lucky you are. What makes you think you would have liked it? Take it from me, you're indignant because you don't know.'" 

He argues that life isn't so bad, saying, "I could tell you a lot about how pleasant my life has been." She retorts, "That's hunky-dory for you; maybe you like the way you are, but most people suffer from it." But her main point is that Augie is a man, and can't possibly know what she's going through: "she was the one for whom it was the flesh and blood problem."

So he agrees to go with her to see the doctor, who says that the injection causes contractions, and that it may succeed in aborting the fetus, but that there are no guarantees. She goes through with it anyway, paying fifteen dollars for the injection. She returns to her room, where she suffers cramps, but nothing more. She curses the doctor, and then realizes that she can't carry the child to term even if she wanted to: "I can't let it alone now and be born, with all the stuff I've taken. It might be hurt."

The next day when he gets home, Mimi tells him that she has found a way to get rid of the fetus legally:  She had gone to the clinic and said she was pregnant but was having difficulties. The doctor who examined her said "he was pretty sure I had a tube pregnancy. So I have to be examined again, and if they still think so they might have to operate." Augie doesn't see her for several days, being busy at work and then with Magnus family social obligations. But one day at work he has a call from a nurse at a South Side hospital with a message that Mimi is there and wants to see him. He tells Simon that he needs to leave early, and Simon immediately seizes on the truth that he's involved in some way with Mimi. All Simon is worried about is "If this gets around to them" -- the Magnuses. "I saw that he had already handled the consequences of this to himself; he'd repudiate me, and it would do him no harm."

In the hospital he finds Mimi, depressed because she has had an operation to resolve the tubal pregnancy, but during the operation they had found that the pregnancy was entirely normal. Everyone, she says, has been coming in to congratulate her. She sees no recourse but to return to the doctor who had given her the injection and to have him finish the job. They want her to stay in the hospital for ten days, but she insists that she won't stay that long and tells Augie to make an appointment with the first doctor for late in the next week.

They will need money, so Augie goes back to stealing books. Unfortunately, he gets caught. But the store detective who catches him turns out to be Jimmy Klein, his old partner in crime when they were caught skimming quarters. Klein makes up a story that Augie dropped the books when he was pursued, returns the books to the store, then meets Augie at a cafeteria. Augie learns that Klein is married to a girl he got pregnant: "The path of wretchedness as Mrs. Renling had drawn it for me when she predicted what would happen if Simon married Cissy." Augie tells him that he was stealing the books to pay for his friend's abortion, and Klein lends him the money he needs.

On the day of the abortion, Augie has a date with Lucy, but he manages to get out of it, promising that he'll be on time the next night when there is a formal affair for New Year's Eve. He meets Mimi after the abortion, and finds her so faint that he has to prop her up. "She was only two days out of the hospital, and the variety of decisions she had made alone, not counting pain and blood loss, was enough to have taken away her strength." As they are going down the stairs, they meet Kelly Weintraub, "the Magnuses' cousin by marriage who came from my neighborhood, the one who had threatened me about George." And the doctor, it turns out, is Weintraub's cousin. (Coming so soon after Augie's capture by Jimmy Klein, this is, perhaps, one coincidental close encounter too many at this turn of the novel.)

Augie doesn't have time to spare confronting Weintraub, but he's fully aware that damage has been done. He hurries back to the rooming house with Mimi, who hemorrhages when she is put to bed.

There have great things been done to mitigate the worst human sights and teach you something different from revulsion at them. All the Golgothas have been painted with this aim. But since probably very few people are now helped by these things and lessons, each falls back on whatever he has. 

So Augie copes. The hemorrhaging stops and the next morning "Mimi seemed to be very hot but normally asleep." Augie goes to work, where "Simon kept examining me, so that I wondered whether Kelly had already reached him." But it's only Simon's usual severe watchfulness. At the end of the day he tells Augie to take the Pontiac. When he gets home he meets the roomer next door, Kayo Obermark, who has been looking in on Mimi. She's running a high fever, but doesn't seem to be bleeding. Augie calls Padilla, who brings over some pills for the fever recommended by physiology students.

"Then Lucy phoned to ask me to come an hour earlier than arranged. I felt that there was trouble at that end too and said, 'What's up?'"  She doesn't say any more than to try to be there by eight. It's after six, so Augie shaves and starts to get dressed while talking with Kayo and Padilla about Mimi. Padilla says it might be septicemia or puerperal fever, and that Augie has to take her to the hospital. Mimi objects: "They'll try to get me to tell on the doctor," which she stubbornly refuses to do. But they hustle her into the car, and just as they are about to leave Simon telephones: "I just had a call from Charlotte, and Kelly Weintraub is spreading a story about you that you took a bim to have an abortion." Simon refuses to hear the truth about Augie's relationship to Mimi: "Don't try to tell me you're not horny. We all are, in our family. What do you think started us out in the first place?" He tells Augie that he's done with him, and that he won't stand up to the Magnuses on his behalf. "'You sonofabitch!' I yelled with tears. 'You shit! I hope to see you dead!'"


They take Mimi to the hospital where she had the operation, but are turned away. She reports that she was told, "We got no room in a place like this for people like you. Why didn't you have the kid? Go home and wait for the undertaker." But Padilla knows someone who works in a lab in a North Side hospital who might help. Augie goes in this time, and because he is in a tuxedo gets a little respect from the cop at the entrance: "I was in the clothes of a gentleman, and therefore why should he take chances?"

Padilla locates his friend, and tells the doctor that Mimi tried to abort the fetus herself. The doctor doesn't really believe him, but says, "Well, if the women live we don't look for the abortionist, because what good does it do the profession?" Padilla urges Augie to leave, and the doctor gives him his name so he can ask for him when he returns. Augie figures if Weintraub has already seen Uncle Charlie Magnus he won't be there very long.

When he reaches the Magnuses' he adjusts his tie in the mirror and sees "backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me." He thinks for a moment that if, as she had always said, Lucy really loved him, they could go it on their own, without an inheritance. But "I saw she had been gotten to by her parents and that decisions had been made."

He is told, "you're not what we had in mind for Lucy." She doesn't go counter to them, and her father says, "No dough if she marries you!" As Augie is putting on his coat in the hall, her brother, Sam, tells him "that he would break my back if I bothered his sister, but with all his thickset hairiness and spreading keister, he couldn't make it mean anything to me."

Back at the hospital, he finds Padilla, who has given Lucy blood. Mimi has been taken upstairs, Padilla says. Augie gives him cab fare for the trip back, but he doesn't answer when Padilla asks why he's back from the party so soon. Upstairs he finds Mimi in a room in the maternity ward, the only available place. The doctor tells him not to attract attention or he'll get thrown out. "I think she's going to pull out of it though she did everything she could not to except cut her wrists and take poison."

As he waits, the New Year's celebrations take place, though the noise is distant and faint. Mimi wakes about one, and after they talk briefly Augie walks through the maternity ward, hearing the groans of women in labor and seeing a woman who had given birth on the way to the hospital wheeled in: "she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, like figures of a war." A nurse angrily tells Augie that he shouldn't be there, so after checking on Mimi he leaves.

On the way back he has a flat, and he can't figure out how to use the jack. He realizes that he is not far from the Coblins', for whom he used to work, so he goes there. When morning comes, he looks out at the Greek church across the way, outlined against the blue of the sky.

I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet the sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn't see more beautiful color than this. 

His Cousin Anna shows him a picture of Friedl, whom Augie was always supposed to marry. She is a student at the University of Michigan. Anna asks, "And why do you want to get mixed up with your brother's new relatives, those coarse people?"

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."