9. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 250-327

From "In the night there came an extraordinary phone call ..." to end.

_____

Benn telephones Kenneth at 2:10 a.m. from a phone booth in the laundry room of the Layamons' apartment building. He is in the throes of a panic attack and doesn't want any of them to overhear their conversation. Matilda is insisting that he get Vilitzer to give him the money. Kenneth points out to him that having the money would only give the Layamons more power over him. But Benn is in such a nervous state that he can't focus on any one thing, and now he has a new complaint about his wife, in addition to her shoulders: "Matilda's breasts are so far apart!" Kenneth calls him a "negative fetishist" who fell "out of love with Matilda's shoulders" and this latest discovery is only further evidence of "fragmentation or disintegration." Benn moans, "Why should I fight Uncle to obtain millions for a woman whose breasts are so far apart? It's getting beyond me." But Kenneth finally gets his uncle to calm down and get some rest before they meet for the parole hearing.

The next morning, Benn shows Kenneth the Charles Addams cartoon that had been referred to on the first page of the novel: Gomez and Morticia are holding hands. and the caption reads

"Are you unhappy, darling?"
"Oh yes, yes! Completely."

It has a special significance for Benn. He tells Kenneth that Matilda had suggested that she go to the hearing with him instead of Kenneth, and he turned her down. "He wanted me to see how resolute he had been with her. All I could see was how shook up he was.... If he faltered or stammered, shrewd old Vilitzer would conclude that he was a sexually failed husband with a wife who had the whip hand, sending him on errands. With sex troubles, men always faulted the husband."

In the hearing room they take their places behind Vilitzer, who has adopted the pseudo-Roman hairstyle worn by Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius: "It seems popular with the senior Mafiosi, whom you often see with a small, slightly curled fringe." The hearing is conducted by the governor, "a loosely massive man. In his slackness there were highly organized tensions, and I would have said that he was a dangerous person, a mean fighter." The testimony, sexually explicit but clinical, dealing with evidence concerning the woman's rape, unsettles Benn: "'Do we have to go step by step through all this?' said Uncle, a little distracted. He made me feel like a Mephistopheles who had forced him out of his study and made him face life.... The hearing at such a time of crisis was hell on him. He couldn't approach Uncle Vilitzer without first passing through these sexual agonies."

But approach him he does, after the hearing recesses. Vilitzer agrees to give them fifteen minutes of his time. He tells them that Fishl had spoken to him, and accuses Benn of having been sent by his "new father-in-law and Judge Chetnik, his buddy." He claims that Benn and his sister "realized three hundred thousand dollars" from their parents' "three hundred bucks" investment in the property where the Electronic Tower now stands, and should be happy for that. To Kenneth's surprise, Benn stands up to Vilitzer.

Considering what a state Benn was in, what with the somatic peculiarities of the Layamon build, the triple resemblance of Matilda, Dr. Layamon and Tony Perkins as the killer granny, plus the new complaint that his bride's breasts were so widely separated, with God knows what further forms of nuttiness marking time in his head, I wouldn't have predicted such quiet stability in the face of Vilitzer's rage. 

But in the end, Vilitzer won't agree to pay Benn anything. "You're not the boss over yourself. They're using you to beat up on me. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to settle." And finally, Vilitzer tries to hit Benn. Kenneth intervenes and restrains him, though "he felt as light as an empty plastic egg carton." Just then Fishl enters. Vilitzer "swept -- tottered -- out and we stood silent."

When Vilitzer has left, Fishl says they should have waited and given him time to prepare his father for the meeting. "And I'll tell you, Cousin Benno, I'd think better of you if you had gone after him on your own initiative, not on instructions from outside parties." When Fishl leaves, Benn tells Kenneth that the matter is now between Matilda and himself, and when Kenneth asks if "Matilda will be able to accept an alternative -- give up her plans for the Roanoke," Benn replies, "You seem to have decided in advance that Matilda is an unyielding person."

Later, Benn calls Kenneth several times to tell him about his lunch with Matilda, but Kenneth finds his conversation confused and unfocused. "The downtown hearing was like the strip show in Kyoto in its effect. Hard-edged sex, one might call it, abstract excitement, maddening literalness when the girls invited the public to stare at their inmost secrets." Kenneth learns more from a later conversation with Matilda in which she told him that, knowing how upset he would be at facing Vilitzer, she had made herself sexually alluring to Benn: "I ... put up my hair the way he liked it. He thought a woman should show her neck and didn't care for the hair to be down, schoolgirl fashion, what he called the Alice in Wonderland effect. Your uncle could make very special demands. Everything had to be 'just so.' In sexual relations also." She goes on to tell Kenneth that his uncle liked for her "to put on a frilled blouse when they made love. Also that he had a decided preference for the foot of the bed and for one corner of the mattress." Kenneth says that what he really wanted to know "was how seriously she took Uncle." The rest was too much information.

Matilda wanted to be a tough broad in the brokerage world but also comfortably married to a respected professor, living in style at the Roanoke, where (a lady with fluent, current French) she could have something approaching a salon even in a vulgar town like this. Lastly, she had made a cult of deep sleep, and for that the Roanoke was the perfect setting.

Then the problems with Treckie resurface. Tanya Sterling calls to tell Kenneth that her private investigator has found that Treckie is marrying the snowmobile man, but during the off-season in that business they planned to "operate from a base on Puget Sound and make the flea market circuit in a van or trailer or camper. Little Nancie would travel with them, naturally, although I was to be offered an option of taking her to live with me summers, when Treckie would be busiest." Naturally, Tanya once again insists that she and Kenneth should marry and sue for full custody.

Among numerous calls from Benn to inform him that Matilda is unyielding in her insistence on living in the Roanoke and the consequent necessity of trying to come to terms with Vilitzer, Kenneth also hears from Fishl, who is getting ready to fly to Miami Beach, concerned about the state of his father's health. And that night, about 3 a.m., Benn calls to tell him that he has also heard from Fishl, who "rang me to say he didn't know how long Uncle Harold would last. He's on standby out at the airport -- can't afford full fare to Florida. Frantic! As if it were all my fault." And after the call, Benn tells him, he couldn't sleep and began wandering around the Layamons' apartment. "When it's as bad as that, I've often gotten reinforced by that azalea in Jo Layamon's office." This time, he says, he "really had to have plant contact," so he broke the house rule about going into Mrs. Layamon's sanctum, where he discovered that the plant that had given him so much solace was

"a phony.... Made of silk. Probably in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Damn near perfect imitation. False, though. A stooge azalea -- a stand-in, a ringer, an impostor, a dummy, a shill! I was drawing support for weeks and weeks from this manufactured product. Every time I needed a fix, a contact, a flow, I turned to it. Me, Kenneth! After all these years of unbroken rapport, to be taken in.... The one thing I could always count on. My occupation, my instinct, my connection ... broken off....

"You don't grasp the meaning of a thing like this. I've lost it. Week after week of imaginary contact!"

The peculiar treasure lost! It wasn't that I didn't grasp what he was telling me. I grasped it only too well. 

So he tells Kenneth that he's decided to go to Florida. He and Matilda were scheduled to fly to Brazil via Miami, and they can meet at the airport. He had called to check on Vilitzer and learned that he had collapsed. Kenneth agrees to go with him to the airport. Benn also asks Kenneth to move into his apartment -- rent free. "The bank has standing instructions to pay the rent. I kept Lena's account in her own name."

In this connection, I couldn't help thinking of Aunt Lena ... who had introduced me to the valuable idea that modes of seeing were matters of destiny, that what is sent forth by the seer affects what is seen. She like to give the example of Whistler the painter when he was taken to task by a woman who said, "I never see trees like that." He told her, "No, ma'am, but don't you wish you could?" 

At the airport, Kenneth bids his uncle goodbye and then takes a flight to Seattle. He gears himself up for a fight with Ronald, Treckie's boyfriend, and when he reaches their apartment he barges past her in search of him. She tells Kenneth that Ronald has gone to Mass, and he goes into a rage in which he trashes the bathroom. After he calms down, they talk, and Treckie confirms what Tanya learned from the private investigator. He asks how Nancy is going to fit into this way of life, and she says, "Kids like movement, and there's a lot to learn around flea markets. They attract scads of characters. Haggling is good training." But when he tells her that he's moving out of the dormitory into Benn's apartment and responds to her observation that he'd "need some help with a woman" by saying, "I have somebody in mind," she comes around to the idea that Nancy could stay with him "on a trial basis." (He thinks, "Dita had enough of the romantic womanly about her to develop some kindness even towards Treckie's daughter.") As for the bathroom, Treckie says, "That's all right. As I figure, you had one tantrum coming to you."

 On the telephone, Benn tells him that Vilitzer is dead. He has also realized that "when you go against your deeper instinct you set off a train of cause and effect spreading in all directions. I drew on that damned azalea for weeks and got an illusion of feedback from it. Now everything has been adversely affected, so that I can't even believe myself when I say I did nothing to shorten Vilitzer's life." He promises to call Kenneth tomorrow afternoon, and in the meantime if Matilda calls him, not to tell her anything about Vilitzer: The family has covered up the death "for some complicated business tactical reason."

The call from Benn is late in coming the next day, and Kenneth has begun to believe that Benn has left for Brazil with Matilda without calling him. But Benn explains that he has told Matilda that Vilitzer is still alive and that he feels obligated to stay on in Miami: "I couldn't go away while my mother's brother was dying." So Matilda has left without him.

"By the time she's landing in Brazil I should be well on my way to the North Pole. You see, they've assembled an international team of scientists for the purpose of special researches. And I signed on three days ago, to check out lichens from both poles, a comparative study, and work out certain morphological puzzles.... We're going to be based in northern Scandinavia, at the edge of Finland, actually. And beyond.... nothing but night and ice will help me now. Night so that I can't see myself. Ice as a corrective. Ice for the rigor."

He has left his address in a drawer in his desk. Kenneth promises not to give it to Matilda.

8. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 211-249

From "In his old apartment next afternoon ..." through "... 'Take care,' I said."

_____

Kenneth and Benn meet in Benn's old apartment, where Benn tells his nephew about his meeting with Layamon at the hospital: The doctor hadn't finished his rounds and gave Benn a white coat and told him to pretend to be his associate. The patients were all old women, and Benn was so embarrassed at being there as Layamon examined them that he began to have cardiac arrhythmia. "I felt very bad about the old ladies, and how awful they'd have felt if they had known I was just there for laughs, as Doctor intended by this prank."

But the thing that struck him in particular was, when he was walking behind Layamon, "From the shoulders alone you could identify him as Matilda's dad.... seen from behind, they're alike in build." This seems insignificant to Kenneth, who is more interested in what the doctor told him about the Vilitzer case. Benn says that the doctor wants him to confront Vilitzer: "I'm supposed to say that my father-in-law believes I was short-changed and that I feel the question should be reopened." Benn is upset by the whole thing: "Goddamn these bastards, will they never stop fighting about money! All I wanted was to settle down with an affectionate wife, in a civilized style." He suggested that he could write Vilitzer a letter, but Layamon insisted that nothing should be put in writing, that they'll find a way to arrange a meeting, and that he shouldn't wait for Fishl to talk to his father: "You're leaving for Brazil in less than a week, and besides, Fishl is a wimp and disowned by his old man."

So Benn has agreed. Vilitzer is a member of the state parole board, and an open hearing on a case is scheduled for the next Friday. Benn wants his nephew to come with him and approach Vilitzer there. This goes against what Fishl has advised, but Kenneth reluctantly agrees.

Benn now tells Kenneth what had so disturbed him when he recognized the physical resemblance between Matilda and her father. During the fall, while Kenneth was away in Paris and East Africa, Benn and Matilda had spent a week in the Berkshires. One evening Matilda was bored and suggested that they go see Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho at a theater that was showing classic films. Benn had disliked the movie when he first saw it, and liked it even less this time. "It was a phony. I hated it. I hate all that excitement without a focus. Nothing but conditioned reflexes they've trained you into." Matilda, however, loved it. But the scene that made the greatest impression on Benn was the murder of the detective, Arbogast:



When he saw the figure of Tony Perkins as Mrs. Bates emerge and stab Arbogast, Benn noticed that the "shoulders were stiff and high, unnaturally wide for a woman.... Identification was instantaneous. That person seen from the rear was Matilda. this was as conclusive as it was quick. For Benn it would always be what it was at first sight." 

In fact Benn -- or maybe Bellow, who didn't have the benefit of YouTube to check -- has remembered the scene imperfectly. Mrs. Bates is not seen as "a static figure that waited on the landing." We see only the door to her room opening, and see her figure only fleetingly as she attacks Arbogast. And she is wearing a calico house dress, not the "long Victorian skirt, and .. shirtwaist of dark calico stretched over her shoulders." Nor is her appearance in the scene long enough for us to identify those shoulders as "stiff and high, unnaturally wide for a woman." But the misremembrance is telling: Benn has complained that Hitchcock's film is "Nothing but conditioned reflexes they've trained you into." His memory of the scene suggests that he has conditioned himself to see Matilda in the murderous Mrs. Bates. He struggles against this impression.

But merging Matilda with Tony Perkins playing a psychopath -- that was a deadly move. No harm meant, not really. It came from a greater depth and seemed to paralyze Benn. "I couldn't distance myself from it," he said. This wasn't one of your fleeting memory squibs, or flirting, playing with horror; it was serious. The woman was his fiancée. The wedding was planned, invitations were being engraved. And this vision in the movie house told him not to marry her.

He tries to dismiss the movie as "box-office crap" and "trash," but he's unable. "He couldn't escape the sense that he had committed a crime." Adding to this sense of guilt, when they reach their car they discover the headlights don't work, and there are no open garages. They start for home driving slowly and using their flashers, but are forced to stop by a man who gets out of his car, "cursing. 'You shit-ass! You prick! You queer!'" Matilda is angry and tells Benn that he doesn't have to take the abuse, but he tells her he's drunk and perhaps dangerous. She retorts, "Backing down under threats is a Holocaust mentality." They wind up going back to the town, paying a fine, and spending the night in a hotel. But even when they learn that the man who stopped and cursed them is a deputy sheriff, Matilda still wants to accuse him of being drunk. Benn tells Kenneth, "maybe she was being virile for me, since I was too schmucky to do battle for myself."

Kenneth observes, "Practically from on high (though Alfred Hitchcock and Tony Perkins were the effective agents), he had been told, 'Don't marry her. She's not the woman of your heart.'" He sees Benn as "burdened, bowed to the ground by the weight of Matilda Layamon's shoulders, which were heavier than solid bronze."

Dita has invited Kenneth to dinner. "She wasn't yet well enough to be seen in a restaurant, and on these winter evenings I was her only company. Next Monday her sick leave ended and she was going back to work." He has an expensive bottle of wine his father has given him. First he stops to check his voicemail, which includes a message from Fishl that his father is flying up for "some kind of business" and that Benn shouldn't approach him until Fishl has prepared the way. Kenneth, who knows about the parole board meeting already, reflects that it's too late: Layamon has already given Benn press passes for the hearing. The other message is from Tanya Sterling, who still wants Kenneth to accept her "proposition" -- to marry her and seek custody of his daughter -- and tells him that she's hired a private investigator in Seattle. "She was making a bid to take me over, just as Matilda had taken over Uncle. The very thing that Caroline Bunge had attempted."

But he is still somewhat attracted to Dita Schwartz.

A woman with a well-developed figure, she had lips of the Moorish type, a nose perhaps fuller than my own criterion for noses could come to terms with and a solid face with nothing masculine in its solidity. Excepting some negligible defects, she was terribly handsome. Her skin was almost healed -- an ice rink scarred by skate blades, was my figure for it. The scars would presently go away.

He tells her that he and Benn are going to the parole hearing, having been given press passes, which surprises her because the case being heard is big news: It involves a man named Sickle, who has been serving time for the rape of a young woman named Danae Cusper. She has recanted her testimony against him after some kind of religious conversion.

They talk about Benn and Matilda, and Kenneth drinks rather more of the wine he has brought -- she prefers boilermakers -- than perhaps he should. He retells, once again, Fishl's observation about what women want: "No real person has everything they dream of, so they assemble parts and elements from here and there -- a large cock, a sparkling personality, millions of dollars, a bold brilliant spirit like Malraux, the masculine attraction of Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, the manners of a French aristocrat, the brain of a superman in physics." (The list takes on a slightly different configuration each time.) But he doesn't spend the night with her.

7. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 192-210

From "Choosing a bright day ..." through "... its rear fumes giving me a diesel headache."

_____

Kenneth and his uncle visit the observation deck on the hundred-and-second story of the Electronic Tower. They are high above the site of Benn's old neighborhood, but he's not inclined to comment on that: "The single remark Benn did pass was about his father's death, somewhere under us, twenty years ago."

And for a time, Kenneth, too, is detached from his uncle's current concerns. He has received a note from Treckie's mother, Tanya Sterling, who will be in town and wants to see him. Figuring he'd better consult Treckie before this encounter, he telephones her in Seattle, but a man answers. "With interpretive skills sharpened by suspicion and jealousy, I judged that the fellow was in the middle of his supper, and Treckie was called away from the gas range." He also deduces that "the man was well established there.... I never had been invited to a meal by Treckie in Seattle." He avoids questioning her about the man, however, and asks instead about her mother's invitation. Tanya, she tells him, has just returned from five years in Costa Rica ("She was playing out a romance with some Robert Vesco type the government hasn't been able to extradite") and paid her a visit in Seattle. Treckie has no problem with his meeting with her, so he calls the Marriott and leaves a message for Tanya.

Meanwhile, he is taking care of Dita Schwartz. "Owing to an adolescent case of acne, her face was uneven with scar tissue and deeply white," so she has located a dermatologist "who made her a price to remove the top layers of dead skin right in his office, under a local anesthetic." He picks up Dita at the man's office, and finds her swathed in bandages and beginning to faint with pain as the anesthetic wears off. "The torments and martyrdoms to which women submit their bodies, the violent attacks they make on their own long-hated faults or imagined deformities! Gladly assaulting themselves. The desperate remedy. The poor grinding their faces."

So for the several weeks of Dita's recovery, Kenneth plays nursemaid and housekeeper for Dita. "In the end, Dita didn't have a new face. The extreme pallor went away; the coarse weave, however, remained. It mattered less now, for if the experiment didn't succeed, there was a broader relationship between us, we were on a more intimate footing."

He meets Treckie's mother in the bar at the Marriott. "Mrs. Sterling was a youthful woman, relatively. She immediately said, 'I was a child bride,' a statement in which there was an implied carryover. She was still a sexual woman." She tells him that she had lost touch with Treckie during her stay in Costa Rica, and hadn't even known she had a granddaughter until she visited her. When he tells her he had spoken to Treckie after receiving her note, she asks if Treckie told him about Ronald, the man who lives with her. She calls him "a bruiser type" and "disagreeable," a former ski instructor who now sells snowmobiles, and indicates that Treckie would be better off with Kenneth.

Tanya begins to remind him of Caroline Bunge, his uncle's unstable friend. "Both had a considerable experience of men. Together they had probably seen more nude males than the U.S. surgeon general." And he reflects on his ignorance of contemporary sexual mores.

I might have learned something from Gide, Proust and others whom as a Parisian adolescent I had read as a matter of course. But not even Proust had covered the ground as the ground now was: The sexual tastes of the aristocracy, the misbehavior and hanky-panky of the haute bourgeoisie, the animal embraces of the proletarians and the peasantry (see Zola's Germinal, and so forth), were not in the same class with the contemporary democratized-plus-Third-World erotic mixture. Millions of persons had been freed from labor, routine, vows, incest prohibitions, and the rest of that to invent freely, and all the ingenuity of mankind, or as M. Yermelov used to say, intellect without soul, was turned loose -- the will of the insane to suffer pouring into erotic channels. You could well believe that  divine master plan for the evolution of love had miscarried, that the angels in their innocence had got the signals mixed up and inculcated all the wrong impulses into mankind.

And now Tanya makes a startling proposition: He should sue for custody of his daughter, and to strengthen his case they should get married -- "for the purpose, and only for the purpose." She says, "this startles you," and he says, "You're right."

He tries to evade the issue, by suggesting that, according to what Fishl has recently told him, she shouldn't "depend on the effect of reason in a courtroom," and he rattles on with a differently populated version of what Fishl had told him about women looking for a variety of different things in men: "a Sugar Ray physique, Mastroianni charm, romantic courage like Malraux, scientific wizardry like Crick and Watson with the double helix, millions like Paul Getty, plus a Spinoza brain." She responds, correctly, "Kenneth, you're evading me." She admits that she's ten years old than he is (he estimates the figure to be more like twenty), and claims that she wouldn't expect anything of him: "If you held me in your arms in bed, I'd be happy."

When she proposes that they go to her room and spend a night together, "to see what it might be like," he makes as swift an exit as possible, reflecting that "it would be against my rule of truthfulness to conceal the fact that I am fond of preposterous people. And what stunning offers you can get from the insane!"

6. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 164-191

From "Here I could pay myself a compliment..." through "... It's like the Yeats poem: 'Many times I died, / Many times I rose again.'"

_____

Kenneth goes to see Vilitzer's son Fishl, who broke with his father fifteen years ago and has been making his way, more or less, on his own. Among his careers was as as an abortionist, using acupuncture to serve his clients. But he was sued by a woman who had a baby after going through the procedure.

You can always count on litigation. A Philadelphia jury has just awarded big damages to a lady who was robbed of her psychic powers after undergoing a CAT scan. After long years as a medium, she was forced to close up shop. Say what you like about America, but few countries have welcomed originality more warmly, and never before has it been a mass phenomenon. 

Kenneth is driven to Fishl's office by his friend Dita Schwartz, who "had an eye on me, that couldn't be denied for one moment," though Kenneth is still holding out for Treckie. The office is in an old, rundown building along with other strange little firms, including a taxidermist and a homeopathic pharmacist. It "shared a corner of the corridor with a men's lavatory." Fishl and Kenneth scrutinize each other: "What he observed was a member of the family; age thirty-five; education foreign; communication powers mediocre-to-low; hearing impaired; not stupid but hampered by singular preoccupations."

When he asks Fishl if he knows the judge who performed the ceremony for Matilda and Benn, and tells him it was Amador Chetnik, Fishl is surprised, but comments: "They might have stopped scheming for at least fifteen minutes, those people. That old Layamon -- I've heard about him. They say he's got more angles than the geometry book." He goes on to explain what we have already learned from Kenneth's report on Benn's lunch with Layamon: that Chetnik is under investigation by the U.S. attorney and that Layamon is using both Chetnik and Benn against Vilitzer. Like Layamon, Fishl says that the reason Kenneth's mother lost her suit against Vilitzer is the incompetence of her lawyer.

Fishl compares the course of his life to Benn's. They knew each other in college, where they tried to get a patent for a lightweight, collapsible bicycle made of bamboo. "Inventing a a bamboo bike was merely his entertainment. Making a killing was my motive." But Benn was blessed with much better luck than Fishl:  "Benn stepped out at a higher level without looking right or left, as if walking out of a fiftieth-story window, and he never got hurt." He goes on to explain that Chetnik is really a pawn in the U.S. attorney's hands in an effort to get at Harold Vilitzer.

"Now, suppose that Chetnik tells the truth about the Electronic Tower case.... You can finish the sentence for me."

"Old Layamon can reopen it, and recover millions for Uncle Benn.... Millions for Benn means million for Matilda. That's why Chetnik was invited to tie the knot."

"Look, chum. I'm the unhappy Edgar, cursed by old Gloucester, his father. That's why I'm in this shit-house office while my brothers are up in pig heaven.... My dad has never been exactly a good guy, but I'm his son and long to save him. Be reconciled. Behind it all is Donovan Stewart.... Governor Stewart, of our own state. In his time he was the U.S. attorney here, and every single successor has been one of the young guys from his original team. Guess for yourself whether or not Stewart has influence on the present incumbent."

So if Chetnik makes an immunity deal for testimony against Vilitzer, he can get, Fishl explains, "A reduced sentence, plus he gets to keep his boodle, and maybe a fast parole deal. Maybe also a cut of what Benn can recover from Dad."

Kenneth assures Fishl that Benn really isn't interested in getting money out of Vilitzer: "he didn't marry for wealth, just for beauty." Fishl is skeptical, but points out that Matilda may be interested in buying a seat on the stock exchange -- he has heard rumors to that effect: "There's a mad search for gifted women." The firm of Fingal Brothers and Hockney is said to be interested in Matilda: "It's a mutual fund. She'd need some training ... but it does them credit to have a lady wizard in an executive spot." When Kenneth reiterates that Benn isn't interested in money, Fishl replies, "Sounds like the lady acquired him.... Would you put it past Dr. Layamon to have had this in mind from way back? After all, Electronic Tower is big stuff. Worth having a shot at that kind of money."

Kenneth protests that Matilda "could have easily married rich," but Fishl suggests that by marrying Benn she could have that and more:

"But a famous professor is always a good catch for a woman who doesn't like vulgar society. The best husband for most women is a composite.... Candid women will tell you, I'd like some of this and some of that -- a little Muhammad Ali for straight sex, some of Kissinger for savvy, Cary Grant for looks, Jack Nicholson for entertainment, plus André Malraux or some Jew for brains. Commonest fantasy there is.... Now she's Mrs. Benno Crader, and she can draw interesting people to her set.... Her father isn't giving away a thing, that's his reputation, and think how thrilling it would be to turn the son-in-law into a millionaire, which he might have done himself if he hadn't been such a creepo." 

Fishl proposes to make contact with his father and find out where he fits into all this. "Above all, tell your uncle not to go to my dad on his own. Warn him against it." Kenneth realizes that "Fishl was setting himself to engage and outmaneuver Dr. Layamon, Judge Amador Chetnik, and even -- in a remote perspective -- Governor Stewart, who allegedly managed all the grand juries in this federal district. Fishl had the nerve to consider himself a match for these stars, this killers' row."

He returns to where Dita had agreed to pick him up. She tells him she had been to see a dermatologist. "She said this lightly, so I didn't guess that she had anything serious in mind (for instance, an attempt to change her looks so that she could rival Treckie).  I was so much involved with Uncle Benn, the riddle of the Roanoke, the grand juries, and the rest of it, that I was slow to understand the signals Dita was giving."

Returning to his office, he finds a note from his uncle, "At home, this P.M." He realizes that this means Benn's old apartment and goes to see him there. Kenneth doesn't tell him everything that he and Fishl talked about. When he suggests that Benn could say no to everything: to moving into the Roanoke and to the maneuvers with Vilitzer, Benn replies, "How can I? I have a certain obligation to Matilda... I can't tell her that she has to lead the dull life of a professor's wife." Kenneth realizes that because of his own relationship with Treckie, he doesn't have much to say that wouldn't sound like hypocrisy.

When he urges Benn to let Fishl handle his father, Benn resists: "I prefer to do it myself, if it has to be done at all.... I can't think of a single thing that Fishl ever succeeded in." Moreover, he has a new perspective on the matter:

"Everything looks different from Parrish Place. I've never lived so close to the center of things. And every time I come near a window, I see that goddam skyscraper. My old life is lying under it -- my mother's kitchen, my father's bookshelves, the mulberry trees. It's like one of those drowned villages in the TVA valley, where you'd have to be a scuba diver to revisit your childhood."

Kenneth is convinced, however, that Fishl is on the right track and that Benn is just playing into the hands of the Layamons. He reflects again on what his uncle "said to the newsman who interviewed him on the dangers of radioactivity from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl -- something like: 'Sorrow at heart killeth full many a man.' And it's a safe guess that there are more deaths from heartbreak than from atomic radiation. Yet there are no mass movements against heartbreak, and no demonstrations against it in the streets." 

But most of all, he hates to see his uncle "used against Harold Vilitzer."

5. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 132-163

From "The problem was not with opulence and luxury ..." through "... The rest follows from this."

_____

Mrs. Layamon, Benn tells Kenneth, has a "sanctum" in which she "tapes poetry for people in nursing homes." It also contains a splendid azalea, which to Benn's regret is off-limits to him. Matilda, he says, sleeps late and wakes "snappish, morose," which is a bit of a trial for him, "liveliest when he woke up." She also dislikes his friendliness with the servants. But Benn, familiar with the alien through his work with plants, takes it in stride, Kenneth observes:

For all I know, he viewed her as a sheaf of ferns bound up in the satin edging of the  eiderdown, and expanding at the top, fronds of long hair coming down over shut eyes. But then he hadn't married a plant. Matilda might remind you of a fern or a lily of the field, and maybe the plant element was strong in her -- the trouble she had waking suggested a struggle between the two natures -- but she did wake, however reluctantly, and came out at last in her gorgeous housecoat, a brocade of Far Eastern design. 

For Benn, one major problem with staying at the Layamons is the looming presence of the Electronic Tower that sat now on the neighborhood where he was raised and is a constant reminder of his being cheated by Vilitzer. Mrs. Layamon referred to the tower as an "important piece of modern beauty," but Benn keeps his silence about his opinion of it. He does venture a comment that the house that the tower replaced had two very fine mulberry trees. "Expressive looks passed among the Layamons. Uncle was aware of these but interpreted them as signs of boredom. There he was definitely wrong, as we shall see."

Matilda and her mother busy themselves "with bridal registry choices, deciding between Lalique and Baccarat and also linens and kitchenware. A more experienced housekeeper than either of them, Benn had ideas of his own about pots and pans and dishwashers.... However, he wasn't consulted, nor did he try to put in his two cents." He even goes shopping with Matilda and keeps his mouth shut when she buys a dishwasher, even though he knows that for a hundred dollars more they could get one "a thousand times better."

Kenneth comes to dinner one evening at the Layamons to watch his uncle "in the role of the botanical professor bridegroom and son-in-law -- Dr. Chlorophyll." He is able to see for himself the view of the Electronic Tower: "It drew close in the night, a mass of lighted windows bigger than the Titanic, and the fiery masts like a sign to the children of Israel."

Benn goes to the Roanoke to measure the rooms in the apartment Matilda had inherited from her aunt, and confirms Kenneth's "Venetian palace comparison." The rooms had been shut up for a year and "smelled like sickrooms." He wanted to ask Matilda if her aunt had "been incontinent? Did she keep cats or dogs?" But he doesn't. "All I could say was that it was pretty lavish." She does strike the right note when him when she points out that "the windows look straight into the treetops" -- a stand of sycamores.

A true plant man diffused his personal essence into leaves, internal tissues, and sent himself from the root-clutched soil to the highest extremities. As if talking to himself he spoke of forces from the center of the planet, akin to grief, driving green impulses to the surface and into the sun, which act was applauded by the leaves. I'm not sure he actually knew what he was saying. He trusted me enough to ramble, to put unaccountable thoughts, inadmissible notions, into words. 

But Benn's main concern about the apartment is the expense of remodeling and furnishing it. When he ventures to suggest an economy, she replies, "'No, dear.' ... This 'dear,' the 'dear' of contradiction, was laid down like a cement block." He comes to realize that "the Roanoke wasn't simply an apartment. You couldn't just live in it. If you tried, you'd decay.... You had to give parties here -- dinners, private concerts -- otherwise the surroundings would have a disembodying effect on you and pretty soon you'd be a spook, haunting the pantry." Matilda envisions it as a place for a salon: "Visitors passing through, people like Dobrynin, Kissinger, Marilyn Horne, ballet dancers, Günter Grass -- on the road, and no better place to kill an evening -- would discover a civilized haven."

Again, the expense troubles Benn: "This fifteen-room leviathan will swallow my whole salary, and then some." Matilda tells him not to worry:

"Naturally I've considered this from all sides," she said, smiling. "I thought it would appeal more to the Don Quixote in you."

Benn said, "Quixote was a bachelor."

"I meant that the irrationality of it might appeal to you." 

He suggests that they could "fix up the front, the showy part, and you and I can live in the rear," but that, too, is dismissed by Matilda. He tells Kenneth, "It's a three-cornered match: Matilda, me and the Roanoke. I hadn't realized that. Well, how could anybody, beforehand?" But to ease his concern about finances, she sets up a lunch with her father to talk about them.

Kenneth considers "the facts as I then knew them: A beautiful woman unites herself with a world-famous botanist. He may think it will serve his needs. No, all the while she has been thinking what she can do with him." And before Benn's lunch with Dr. Layamon, he suggests that his uncle ask about the judge who performed the wedding ceremony. Benn promises to do so.

The lunch takes place at a pretentious restaurant "on the seventy-fifth floor of one of the newest high-rises." The doctor indulges in medical talk, including the way he counsels aging patients on impotence, which provokes Benn to ask, "Okay, William, why are you telling me about hormones or inflating the genital? You think I'm going to make you some medical confession?" But he learns that the doctor already knows what he needs to know about him: "we ran a little check on you, purely private and absolutely discreet." The news is somewhat unsettling. As if to compensate, the doctor tells him that when Matilda was born, "we physicians had to puzzle over the baby. Was it a boy or a girl?" Benn assures him "she's a woman through and through."

Finally, Benn gets around to asking Kenneth's question: "I want to know why you brought in that Chetnik man to perform the ceremony." He's "an old family friend," Layamon replies, and when Benn says, "He was the judge in our case against Vilitzer," Layamon says he was aware of that, too. Finally, the doctor reveals that he was expecting the question. He had persuaded Matilda to have the judge do the ceremony, and after more back-and-forth on the matter, including a revelation that Amador Chetnik is "changing loyalties," Layamon comes out with the truth:

"Well, as you will have figured, with a brain like yours, the object is to recover money from Uncle Harold. That's the overall game plan."

"For the purpose of refitting the Roanoke palazzo?"

"Right! And then some."

A U.S. attorney is investigating Chetnik, who is ready to name Vilitzer in exchange for leniency. Layamon wants Benn to approach his uncle to discuss terms. If the attorney can put Vilitzer in jail, that will advance his political aims: "a clear path to the U.S. Senate. Or you become governor and you're even mentioned for the presidency." So if Benn threatens to reopen his case against Vilitzer, the threat of investigation will provide some leverage for Vilitzer to settle. It all becomes clear to Benn: "And with Amador Chetnik, now going in reverse, coaching us on the legal side. Yes, I get it. And this was why you asked the judge to unite Matilda and me."

But Benn also insists, "I don't want to harm Vilitzer -- he's my uncle. Sure he's been rough. Still, he's my uncle -- he's Mama's brother." Layamon retorts, "The main consideration is justice. You were gypped out of millions. And it turns out that your new family is protecting your rights, and by rights you should be set up in a place like the Roanoke." He tells Benn that he should ask Vilitzer for five million dollars, "ready to come down to three. I'd estimate his total net worth at a hundred million." Layamon says he should do it for Matilda, who "wants a brilliant position for herself, no more than a woman like that is entitled to." And he can't do it on his salary.

"If you're going to share the bed of this delicious girl of high breeding and wallow in it, you'll have o find the money it takes. And it so happens that the single most valuable piece of real estate in this town was your property until five years ago, when you were screwed out of it, chum. We think you can be made whole. So here goes."

4. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 104-132

From "I had gone to see my mother in East Africa ..." through "...Which side do you think I'm from?"

_____

Benn's marriage took Kenneth completely by surprise: When his uncle drove him to the airport for his trip to see his mother in Africa, Benn had made no mention of Matilda, or even of the fact that he was seeing her, even though Kenneth had introduced him to her. Kenneth's feelings are hurt, and he behaves like a jilted girlfriend. "Somewhere, I'm still sore because he cheated on me -- broke the rules of our relationship."

Kenneth's mother is surprised by the marriage, too, but she uses it as an occasion to warn him against his "tendency to imitate" his uncle, telling him: "Treckie would not be a suitable wife. She belongs to the Ken Kesey acid culture and all that craziness which is now passé and doesn't yet realize it." But she rubs salt in his wound by saying that "now your uncle will need you much less than formerly." Kenneth is convinced that "Uncle had never needed me so badly as now."

Matilda had come to Paris to do research for her Ph.D. thesis, which is where Kenneth's mother had become acquainted with her. When she returned home, she made contact with Kenneth and through him with Benn.

She was now in her thirties, had never been married, was not too old to have children, and what she was looking for was a husband. It never entered my mind that Uncle Benn might be thought a candidate for matrimony by this glittering, nervous, French-Midwestern woman.

As it turned out, she was the one who asked Benn to keep their relationship secret. "I might be a dear person, and obviously Uncle doted on me, but nobody could deny that I was a bit on the weird side and notorious for the kinkiness of my theories. Even Mother had hinted (more than hinted) that I was somewhat unstable." Benn describes the places where he used to meet Matilda, and Kenneth recognizes them as "Places where you'd never run into me." Benn denies that he was responsible for that, so Kenneth puts the blame on Matilda.

Benn is staying with Matilda and her parents "in their duplex penthouse, at the peak of a newly constructed building in what passes in this town for a 'fine old neighborhood' -- a cluster of residential condominiums, many of them tawny pink." Kenneth is convinced that his "uncle had no business in such a location." They meet in Kenneth's room in one of the university dormitories, a "bare, devoid-of-comforts place."

Benn tells Kenneth that he is staying with the Layamons temporarily before he and Matilda leave for their honeymoon in Brazil. Kenneth reminds him that he "didn't like Brazil the first time," to which Benn replies, "You'd have to be pretty spoiled to reject such a big piece of the continent," and that Matilda wants to go "To escape the winter. To honeymoon in a warm climate." Kenneth adds, "'Also, to have you to herself for two or three months.' I didn't add: 'To cut me out.'" After they return, they will be moving into a co-op called the Roanoke, which Matilda's aunt left to her in her will. "The Roanoke! Sixteen Venetian palaces piled on top of one another in a towering heap," Kenneth says in astonishment tinged with distaste.

I took the trouble of recording Benn's conversations from his other life (the Layamon one) as he reported them to me, and I've kept the notes. At first he was reserved, intent on making an impression. With time, however, he began to go into greater detail, consistent with his habit of mind.... When he described the wedding ceremony to me, he mentioned that it had been performed near the Layamons' Christmas tree. Although dusted with plastic snow, the tree itself was real. It was a balsam fir, and to this bristling little plant he connected himself somehow. It was like a sister to the bridegroom, the nearest thing to a relative standing up at his wedding.... If while he and Matilda were being united by the judge Benn closed his eyes and swayed slightly, it was because his imagination was enlarging in his head the heavily cutinized epidermis of the needle leaves -- the stomata beneath the surface, the mesophyll, the trabecular projections, the resin canals, the procambium.

Kenneth asks if Vilitzer had been invited, and Benn admits that he was on the guest list though he didn't attend. But he reveals that the judge who performed the ceremony was also the judge, Amador Chetnik, who presided over the trial when Kenneth's mother sued Vilitzer. "At this, my legs dropped off the recliner and I sat upright and turned my head to hear better." He tells Benn that he hopes that the choice of "One of Vilitzer's stable of judges" wasn't his new father-in-law's idea of a joke. "Doctor is a sort of humorist," Benn replies. "He isn't a smooth type at all. But it may have a tactical meaning we can't see yet. Fence mending of some kind."

The Layamons, Benn says, are "definitely friendly" toward him. Mrs. Layamon is "only eight years my senior, about the same age as your mother. Instead of a son-in-law I might be her brother." Dr. Layamon has, in addition to the twelve-room penthouse, a house in Palm Springs, and plays golf with Bob Hope and Gerald Ford. Norman Lear had had them to dinner, and Layamon felt obliged to make a contribution to the American Civil Liberties Union, "As payola." The Layamons had expected Matilda to choose "a husband form any of these spheres. According to Doctor, she passed up a national network anchorman, then a fellow who was now on the federal appeals bench, plus a tax genius consulted by Richard Nixon. The list was fairly long.... Matilda just naturally drew men."

Dr. Layamon is convinced that she

had brains enough to be chief executive officer of a blue-chip corporation. With her mentality you could manage NASA. When Mondale announced for the presidency she sent him a campaign blueprint, and if he had been smart enough to put her in charge he might be in the White House now. Her head is like a computer bank, and all she ever used it for was to contrive more personal trouble, a migraine for her parents, lasting more than three decades. On the chance that there would be less trouble to get into in higher education, they sent her to the best institutions. As a result she has more degrees than a thermometer -- all useless, worth shit.

Layamon, Benn says, has a way of giving compliments and then undermining them. "He complimented Benn on his eminence in botany," and then would make some remark about what a shame it was that he hadn't had his teeth straightened. And in the restroom he inspected Benn's genitals while they were urinating. "His comment was: 'Fire-fighting equipment seems adequate, anyway.'" Matilda later told Benn that she had noticed how quickly her father had followed him to the men's room: "Genitals are a common fixation among doctors."

But Benn also insists, "I am happy with this woman."

3. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 51-103

From "Uncle and I made one long trip together..." through "... a private ceremony in the home of her parents, Dr. and Mrs. William Layamon."

_____

Kenneth has gone to Seattle to try to persuade Treckie to marry him, and his uncle calls to ask him to join him on a flight to Japan. He scolds Kenneth for "Taking the usual beating from that dainty little woman. Bears you a child, and then bears you a grudge." But Benn is also taking a beating from a woman, Caroline Bunge: "a department store heiress from Cleveland whom Uncle had met on the seafront in Puerto Rico -- a setting suitable to promiscuity." Caroline "had the appearance of dignity, the composure and the accent of a woman who had been educated abroad in good schools, French and English. She talked Irish horses, jumping, fox hunting, whiskey" and "described her friendships with Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras."

She was attracted to Benn because he was "safe": "Women in my bracket are frightened to death of a von Bülow-type match." But Benn is not ready to marry Caroline, and when she precipitates the matter by having a pre-nup drawn up, hiring a limousine to take them to City Hall, and arranging for a navy chaplain to perform the service, Benn swiftly arranges for a flight to Kyoto. "So at the moment when Caroline was landing on the domestic side of the airport, Uncle entered the international terminal and hurried to the Japan Air Lines counter."

Kenneth's problems with Treckie are the exact opposite. He had been physically attracted to "her shape, short and firm" and the fact that she had "exactly the bosom -- top of its class -- that I preferred.... This sexual kid, I went for her, her small face and miniature smiles together with the full figure, her well-developed bosom. She was like a pale girl-aborigine." The only flaw he found was "that her legs were disfigured by bruises. Her shins were all black and blue," and she wouldn't tell him how she came by the disfigurements.

When Treckie becomes pregnant, he offers to marry her, but she refuses. She keeps her job at the Veterans Administration Hospital during the pregnancy, and in the seventh month he moves into her basement apartment in "a graduate-student slum." Even after the baby, a girl named Nancy, is born, she stays there, even though she "got dividend checks in the mail; she owned AT&T and other blue-chip stocks." Her mother is rich, but they were "on bad terms."

She tells Kenneth "raunchy stories" about the goings-on of the staff at the hospital. Once, she was waiting for the elevator, and when it opened it was dark, with two people having sex on the floor. She turned on the light "and saw that there were several frightened old veterans crowded into a corner of the cab." She regards it as characteristic of the civil service bureaucracy: "The premise is that at the very top of the power structure, in D.C., people are getting away with murder, making themselves government gifts worth hundreds of millions, so why shouldn't the rest of us fool around, play at work."

Kenneth persists in trying to get her to marry him but when the offer of a transfer to Seattle comes, she takes it. She tells him that he has his Uncle Benn, so he won't miss her and Nancy, and that, "You're a very self-sufficient person, with a life plan of his own," and he admits that she was right.

Unconsciously, my interests had developed along lines which, with maturity, revealed a design whose elements can be listed in the following résumé: (a) what Americans are; (b) what Russians are; (c) what Jews -- since I am one of them -- are; (d) what it signifies to say that one is (or is not!) a Citizen of Eternity. To name at random a number of such Citizens will reveal what the word "Eternity" signifies: Moses, Achilles, Odysseus, the Prophets, Socrates, Edgar in King Lear, Prospero, Pascal, Mozart, Pushkin, William Blake. These we think about and, if possible, make our souls by.... If Benn was not yet a Citizen, if Eternity was not ready to give him his second papers, he was as close to it as I had ever been able to come.

His father is not even a contender for Citizenship because "The premise of his eroticism was mortality. The sex-embrace was death-flavored. He translated Eternity as Death." When he tells his father that because Treckie had his child, "I figure that she somehow, somewhere, loves me," his father tells him "you've got your head up your ass, as Aristophanes would say."

We learn that Kenneth got his start in Russian studies from the first person who taught him the language in Paris, a M. Yermelov, who was a mystic who "studied Trismegistus, the Zohar, Eliphas Levi, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus," and was critical of "the disturbed sexuality of the present age."

On the way to Japan, Kenneth reminds his uncle that he had warned him about Caroline Bunge, who "was  very handsome, but she spelled trouble. She was a big, graceful (old-style) lady, vampy, rich, ornate, slow-moving, a center-stage personality ... like a goddess from a Ziegfeld extravaganza." She was also crazy. "It may have been the lithium that made her remote. Being on mood pills was one hundred percent contemporary. If you aren't up-to-the-moment you aren't altogether real. But crazies are always contemporaries, as sandpipers always run ahead of the foam line on the beaches."

She had always been drawn to philosophy, she said [when she first met Benn in Puerto Rico], and she assumed that as a university professor he must be in earnest about metaphysics. For some time she had been puzzling over an important remark made by Buckminster Fuller. She was in the audience and had heared it herself. Fuller said, "God is a verb." She had taken this as a mantra for meditation. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Fuller insisted that Logos couldn't be a noun. He mentioned that in Faust it was said, "In the beginning was the Deed."

Uncle said, "Very good, provided that you know what you're doing."

Trying to find what drew his uncle to Caroline, Kenneth concludes that "she appealed to him by reason of her challenging remoteness." But he also suspects that her eccentricity had its appeal, that "perhaps Uncle reckoned that a woman who didn't know what she was doing would be less critical of a man unsure of himself," and finds some parallels in Russian literature: "Tolstoy's would-be saint, Father Sergius, who could resist the seductions of a society woman, succumbed later to a feeble-minded girl. Old Karamazov took advantage of a moronic woman and made her pregnant. Was this because he was drunk or because a witless creature had a peculiar power to excite him."

Caroline told Kenneth that she had taken LSD in the '60s, and "Uncle told me that Caroline didn't use the pill for birth prevention. Instead, she filled herself with tufts of paper -- facial tissues or torn pieces of paper table napkins. This began towards the end of dinner. As she sat at the other end of the table, she would almost absentmindedly begin to pick at the napkins." So when she called to tell him that she had arranged their marriage, "As soon as he rang off, it seemed to him an eternity before he could get a dial tone and obtain the code for a direct call to Kyoto."

Caroline, it seems, is not the first woman whom Benn has had to flee. A divorced woman named Della Bedell, who lived upstairs from him, came down one evening to ask if he would help her change a light bulb. She said she didn't like to bother the super so late -- it was 10 p.m. "He has to stand on an upholstered dining room chair. She suggests that he remove his shoes. In the end everything is removed." Della has been reading articles about women taking control of their sexuality, and when Benn tries to dodge any subsequent sexual encounters, she grows belligerent, leaving notes in his mailbox that say things like "What am I supposed to do with my sexuality?" So Benn "escapes to Brazil, where he lectures on morphology." But while he's away, she dies of cardiac arrest, leaving him racked with guilt. He tells Kenneth,

"A newspaperman had me on the phone a few days ago.... he wanted a statement about plant life and the radiation level increasing. Also dioxin and other harmful wastes.... Well -- I agreed it was bad. But in the end I said, 'It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.'"

Benn changes the subject to Treckie, as if to make the point that he and Kenneth are brothers in arms when it comes to women.

Later in the year, Kenneth visits his mother in East Africa and tries to get her to talk about her brother. He learns that "'he was a sexy little bastard,' and that mothers on Jefferson Street wouldn't let their little girls play with him," but that he had had some kind of nervous breakdown, "maybe even a schizophrenic episode" when he was seventeen. He had fallen in love with "the daughter of Cohen the tailor," but when she began to see someone else he went "out of his head with grief -- with sex misery. Benn was backward with girls, didn't understand how to conduct himself." His mother grows irritated with his exploration of the subject, especially in the midst of a land plagued with famine, but comments, "Your uncle doesn't know which side is up. He was lucky enough, as much as he deserved, with Lena. She was a decent woman, but by any real standard she was a frump. When she dies he made such a fuss, you would have thought she was some kind of saint. He should stick to his leaves. Or sap, or whatever his business is."

He thinks his mother blames her brother for luring him into the academic life. "She had wanted me to be a big shot. I should have been the Times's number one man in Paris, or chef de bureau for Le Monde in Washington, or NBC's head for Western Europe." She is also irritated with Kenneth about Treckie. "She didn't want me to be an homme à femmes like Dad, but did I have to be the direct opposite?" When he talks to her about his ideas, she wants him to focus instead on the misery in Somalia. "Instead, her only child had arrived to lecture her. In this regard he was like his pa, in whose list of pleasures lecturing came right after sex." She regrets that she let him study Russian with M. Yermelov: "He marked you for life."

Back in Japan, he and Benn are taken around Kyoto by the elderly Professor Komatsu, "a biophysicist who had given the world papers of real scientific power," but also writes poems about "his nanny, whom seventy-five years ago he had deeply loved and who passed away in 1912, when he was six or seven years old." They stop at one point to watch a group of women who are engaged in making houseposts, "scraping, washing, rubbing and polishing the wood." When Benn observes, "Woman who do this work might make wonderful wives," Komatsu laughs, but observes that "Americans who shop for docile wives here often are disappointed. After a year or so in the U.S. the ladies are Americanized. Roles are reversed. In a short while, Professor Crader, you might become the attendant, rubbing a supine wife where she commanded you."

The old Japanese professor said to me while Benn was walking ahead that Uncle had a special gift of observation. It might not be "scientific" in the accepted meaning of the term. There was something visionary about the distinctness with which "plants came before him." You could have a thought that was ultraclear, but there was a further stage, in which it was not merely ultraclear but became visible, as if it were drawn or painted before your inner eye.

One evening, some of the professor's younger colleagues take them to a strip club. But the experience -- of the disrobing women and the dispassionate men in the audience -- unsettles Benn.

Uncle was profoundly upset by a succession of sexual miseries. There was no good reason why Miss Yokohama and Miss Nagasaki should have thrown him so badly, caused him such pain that he determined to settle his life once and for all. About this he didn't level with me.... I can see why it might drive him crazy to discuss matrimony with Kenneth Trachtenberg. What I can't see is why he should have picked a woman like Matilda Layamon, if what he wanted was calme or ordre, let alone volupté. 

Anyway, at Christmas, while I was abroad, he married this lady in a private ceremony in the home of her parents, Dr. and Mrs. William Layamon.

2. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 28-50

From "This is a sample of the topics discussed in our dining room...." through "... I didn't expect him to answer this."

_____

Rudi Trachtenberg's social and sexual charisma is the reason why Kenneth decided to return to America. "Because he was out of the ordinary, a special case. He didn't have to 'make his soul,' like other people. His was made for him by special forces. I, with my 'soul in the making,' had to go to America for the purpose. This can't be very clear as yet, but it will be, I promise." But Rudi is baffled by his son's interest in his brother-in-law, whom he regards as "a schlump, an incompetent.... He missed out on Benn's largeness of mind."

We learn more about Kenneth's great-uncle, Harold Vilitzer, the "old-time pol and ward boss, a machine alderman, as crooked as they came." He is the younger brother of Kenneth's maternal grandmother, and has even been sued by Kenneth's mother, Hilda.

Vilitzer ... was the executor of Grandma Crader's estate. He bought her property from Benn and Mother through a dummy corporation and later sold it to Ecliptic Circle Electronics, which built the tallest skyscraper in the city on that site, almost as big as the Sears Tower in Chicago. From this deal he made an unguessable pile. Mother and Uncle Benn together got $300,000 out of it.... So to sue Harold was mad. There's no saying how many judges he owned. He played golf with the bagmen of those he didn't actually own.

Harold had begun his shady career during World War II by selling army surplus in Italy: "It became surplus as soon as he got his hands on it," Benn told Kenneth. He came back home and "Next thing we knew, he was in politics."

Kenneth became Benn's favorite family member because he "believed I was the only member of the family with whom he could communicate at an advanced level." Kenneth believes that it was because of his own partial deafness: "I wear my hair long to hide the hearing aid. The hard of hearing have to be twice as attentive; many read lips while listening, and such unusual concentration may be taken for agreement." When Benn and his wife Lena came to Europe, they would bring books for Kenneth: "at first, fairy tales, Leatherstocking, Mark Twain and Dickens. Then, as soon as I was  old enough, they started me on Balzac," whom both of them considered a guide to life." Kenneth observes that if Benn had read Cousin Pons "more closely he wouldn't have married Matilda Layamon. She was the only child of rich parents, and Balzac very specifically tells you that only children born to wealth make dangerous wives." In return, Kenneth introduced Benn to Russian writers, such as Nikolai Fyodorov, "whose position was that death lies behind all human problems. The earth is a graveyard and the one and only project of humanity is to reclaim it for life.... I led Uncle on to see what he would make of it. He read with glee, he ate it up."

But Kenneth remains puzzled by Benn's marriage to Matilda Layamon. During the period between his marriages "he had his hands full, dealing with ladies: flirtations, courtships, longings, obsessions, desertions, insults, lacerations, sexual bondage," and his compulsion to travel "had an erotic cause." And Benn was aware that marrying Matilda was an irrational thing to do. He was not looking for a homemaker, because he "rather liked" housekeeping: "He poured Vanish into his toilet. He preferred 409 to all other kitchen cleaners. He did his socks with Woolite. Jobs that drove other men wild, like peeling spuds, cleaning out the cheese grater, scrubbing scorched saucepans, doing the floors on his knees, didn't bother him at all." Kenneth observes that his uncle "was tuned very high and would play on himself because he was tuned, on such tense strings, performance was inevitable." So a casual conversation at a dinner party about vitamins will produce a lecture on cancer research, "free radicals," intestinal bacteria and high-fiber diet. "Sorry she asked, the lady waits for this excitable bore to end his lecture."

In my opinion he was a sex-abused man ... a woman-battered man.... I see ... the actual man, a big fellow, overweight, pale, with a Russian curvature of the back. He walks with a heavy poise. Above the midriff he is sedate. Then the round head, a full face, a pair of eyes in a curve resembling a figure eight laid on its side.

1. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 1-28

Through  "... which absolute knowledge, only now possible, might view all Being."

_____

The narrator, who we will learn is Kenneth Trachtenberg, wants to tell us about his maternal uncle, Benn Crader, "the well-known botanist." Kenneth was brought up in France, which his uncle likes to emphasize as a point of difference between the two of them: "I haven't got your culture. In the Midwest, minds are slower." Dealing with his uncle also makes Kenneth realize "how greatly I resembled my father -- the gestures, the tones, the amiable superiority, the assurance capable of closing all gaps, of filling all of planetary space, for that matter. To discover whom I sounded like shook me up."

His uncle is a specialist in plant anatomy and morphology, and through him Kenneth "became acquainted with some exact-science types whose eccentricities had the color of prerogatives." He is a large man -- Kenneth's father used to say he "was built like a Russian church" -- and "one of those Russian Jews (by origin) who have the classic Russian face, short-nosed, blue-eyed, with light thinning hair." Kenneth is himself an assistant professor of Russian literature at the same university where his uncle teaches.

"After fifteen years as a widower-bachelor," Uncle Benn remarries to a woman who "was more beautiful than the first, more difficult, more of a torment." Kenneth is upset by this: "I had been away, visiting my parents abroad, and he had taken advantage of my absence to marry this lady without prior consultation. He damn well knew that he should have discussed it with me. We had that kind of relationship." Kenneth already knew the second wife, Matilda Layamon.

Benn had done botanical work in Antarctica, studying lichens, and "was a magical person to me when I was a kid, and somehow he remained one. To my father he was the goofy scientist." He was also interested in "herpes, AIDS and other venereal diseases.... I mention this clinical interest because it foreshadows Uncle's later preoccupation with the demon of sexuality. He tried to take refuge from that in marriage." For Kenneth, his uncle "had the magics, and his glamour only increased when Papa put him down."

Kenneth's father, Rudi Trachtenberg "was an American Francophile, originally from Valparaiso, Indiana, determined to be a Parisian." He was also "a hit with women." Kenneth resembles his father: slender, narrow-faced, black-haired and "dolichocephalic" -- having a long head. "I've been told that I look a lot like the actor John Carradine." His parents were upset when Kenneth took a job at his uncle's university in the Middle West: "My mother and my uncle were natives of this city, my immigrant grandparents are buried here, my great-uncle Vilitzer was a top operator in the Democratic machine. Such an American place."

Kenneth's parents are separated. "You can't budge Rudi Trachtenberg from Paris and its companionable streets. He has a circle of pals, and then there are the women, four decades of women -- a benevolent society, a fan club, a veterans' organization." His mother belongs to "a group of medical volunteers stationed near Djibouti."

Both Kenneth and Benn are travelers, especially Benn. "When Lena, his first wife, died fifteen years ago he began to circle to world." He is famous among his colleagues for his ability to "name all the parts of teh storage organ of a given plant down to the hairlets. He did this at lunch around the globe, in the Celebes or Bogotá, while a textbook was handed back and forth across the table. He was more complete than the text!"

Kenneth is concerned about Benn's traveling: "My aim was to protect his goddam life. He was on a dangerous course. Whenever a 747 went down I checked the passenger list."

Not good, to be a man in his thirties betraying such dependency. Maybe Uncle was crisscrossing the intercontinental skies and pacing the great airports of the world in order to do the thinking he couldn't do sitting still. Maybe he was also running away from me." 

Benn is childless, whereas Kenneth has a daughter by a woman named Treckie, whom he never married, and who now lives in Seattle.

Kenneth thinks, "In some sense he had become my father." Rudi is "a one-time event, like the Fall, or Noah's Ark. As a conversationalist he was limited, but his repertory was terrific for his purposes" because he had met FDR, Harry Hopkins, Churchill and Montgomery aboard a destroyer, and in Paris had met Malraux and Sartre who "accused my father of being an American spy because he spoke French too well. I don't want to get started on my father, but he is indispensable for any understanding of my attachment to my mother's brother.... If he had taken Proust to dinner, Father would have given him memorable entertainment."

Kenneth envies his father's way with women: "ladies were never the same after they had met Rudi Trachtenberg, whereas when they parted with me they were completely themselves, as before.... Why wouldn't the mother of my daughter marry me? Would she have refused my father?"