13. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 839-860

Chapter XIX

Iggy finds a room for Augie in the place where he lives, and keeps him company while Augie works through the depression after Thea's departure. "Iggy knew I was in a crisis and didn't want me to be alone." He also has a telling response when Augie asks what he can do to prove to Thea that he loves her: "I don't know what. Maybe you couldn't prove it because you don't." Augie rejects that premise at first, but as he debates with himself he comes around to the realization that perhaps he doesn't really know what love is.

That realization isn't enough to stop him from deciding to go confront Thea in Chilpanzingo "and say that though I was a weak man I could little by little alter if she'd bear with me." As he's boarding the bus Moulton comes out to try to stop him. He tells Augie, "Talavera was Thea's friend, old man. He's there with her in Chilpanzingo." Iggy joins in the attempt to stop Augie, telling him that Talavera had been Thea's lover even before she came there with Augie, and that he left for Chilpanzingo just after Thea did. Moulton also insists that Thea and Talavera were having sex when they were in the mountains while Augie was laid up after the accident.

Enraged, Augie threatens to kill Moulton, but Iggy restrains him while Moulton runs away. Augie is nevertheless determined to get on the bus, so Iggy sees him off. On the bus he thinks about the cat that Thea had in Chicago. "And where was this cat now? Left behind somewhere, nowhere special, and that was how permanent Thea's attachments were." When they reach Chilpanzingo, Augie tries to prepare himself for an encounter with Talavera, and realizes that he doesn't have a weapon. He looks in vain for a shop where he can buy a knife, and even goes into a cafe with the thought of stealing one, but there are none in sight.

"Coming out of the café, I saw the station wagon parked in front of New Orleans ironwork king of place from which there were pieces missing." He goes inside and asks for Thea's room number, and send a man up to ask if she will see him. She calls down to him, and lets him into her room, where he looks for signs of Talavera's presence. "Her eyes were not as keen as usual and she looked ill." He asks if Talavera is there with her, and she says it's none of his business, which he takes as a yes. She insists that he isn't there, "so you can set your mind at rest." Augie takes this as confirmation that he had been there.

She tells him that she's going to Acapulco and then flying to Vera Cruz where she's going to Yucatán to see some rare flamingos. But when he asks her to let him come with her she says no.

Chapter XX

Augie returns to Acatla, where he drinks and pals around with a Russian exile who had been kicked out of troupe of Cossack chorus members. But eventually he decides to pull himself together. He sells his riding boots and other equipment that had been bought for him with Smitty's money and buys a ticket for Mexico City. The money Stella promised to leave for him at Wells Fargo isn't there, so  he looks up Manny Padilla's cousin, but winds up lending him money and never sees him again. So finally he gets in touch with Sylvester, who loans him some money and says that one of the Trotskyites has a place Augie can stay if Frazer vouches for him. Frazer does, so Augie moves in with a man named Paslavitch, "a friendly Yugoslavian who lived in a little villa out in Coyoacán."

After Augie has gotten himself together again, Frazer tells him that he might have a job for him. The chief of the Russian police is in Mexico plotting against "the Old Man," Trotsky. One scheme to elude him is for Trotsky to assume a disguise and travel around the country, posing as a tourist. "If the Old Man is going to travel incognito as a visitor to Mexico he's going to need a nephew from the States" -- Augie and a woman would pose as husband and wife and travel with Trotsky. Augie resists the idea: "Please God! I thought, keep me from being sucked into another one of those great currents where I can't be myself." But when Frazer assures him that it would be only for a few weeks until the Russian agent loses the trail, Augie reluctantly agrees.

In the end, though, the plan falls through, to Augie's relief. So he borrows two hundred pesos from Paslavitch and buys a ticket to Chicago.  

12. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 797-838

Chapter XVII

Augie suffers a concussion and loses some teeth, but Bizcocho breaks a leg and has to be shot, which Augie regrets: "he had been whanged at by blasting shotguns, and it had to be me that killed him." When Caligula returns, he is shipped off to her the zoo run by the friend of Thea's father.

After a few weeks of recuperation, Augie suggests that Thea continue her expeditions. "We had one of those arguments of sacrifice; she didn't want to leave me alone and I insisted that she go out, though I didn't want it to be after snakes that she went." So for a while she contents herself with hunting wild pigs, but eventually comes home with a bag of snakes. Augie is through with hunting, though he doesn't tell her that, and suggests that she gets some friends to go with her. Sometimes Talavera accompanies her.

Still plagued by dysentery as well as his injuries, Augie continues reading in the utopia book. The weather also provides some comfort: "Daily there was this sure blue, while the powerful forces of heaven took it easy over the mossy tiles. The blue beauty compensated me considerably, as did the book when I was in the right mood for it." He also talks to Stella, Oliver's girlfriend, over the wall between the house and the hotel, and she tells him that they are moving out of the hotel into the villa owned by the Japanese man, who has to return to Nagasaki. As they are talking, Oliver comes up and takes her away, without speaking to Augie. Moulton tells Augie that Oliver is jealous.


Augie begins hanging out more with the exiles.

As the house was void, as there were more snakes on the porch, as I wasn't strong enough to go with Thea but wasn't too weak to be restless, as I was horse-shy and hunt-shy, as I was in reality in a fork about my course of life, I stalled and delayed. Besides, I was intrigued with Moulton and Iggy and others of the international colony.

He spends much of his time with Iggy, while he is writing his tales about men on Mars, and at the bar playing poker, "which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn's poolroom."

The tension with Thea continues to grow, partly because Augie loathes her snake collection: "they had parasites that got between the scales, and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis." So even after he regains his health, Augie continues to claim that he's not strong enough to go out hunting with her. For her part, she is disgusted by the set Augie hangs out with. "I think they must make you feel ashamed of me, ever since Caligula. They make fun of me." Augie denies it.

He has become hooked by poker. "I was ahead and couldn't quit." His pockets are full of his winnings in various currencies. "I didn't know exactly what I had. But I did have money. It was mine, not Smitty's." When the divorce papers come, he asks Thea to marry him, but "she simply shook her head." Augie suspects that it's because of their differing social status: "I remembered how once when afraid of pregnancy she let escape the fear of explaining to her family that I was the father."

Leon Trotsky

One day he sees several cars drive up in front of the cathedral, and watches as bodyguards emerge from the cars. Finally the man they are protecting emerges. "As I looked at him I decided with a real jolt that this must be Trotsky, down from Mexico City, the great Russian exile." With him are men with briefcases: "members of radical organizations I used to know in Chicago always had briefcases like those." And then he recognizes one of the bodyguards as "my old friend Sylvester, the one-time owner of the Star Theater, the engineering student from Armour Tech, the ex-husband of Mimi Villar's [sic] sister, the former subway employee." He calls out to Sylvester, and they talk for a while. He asks for an introduction to Trotsky, but Sylvester puts him off, saying, "When you get up to the city phone me. I'd like to see you; we'll have a beer." He also mentions that Mimi's ex-lover, Frazer, is one of Trotsky's secretaries.

Oliver is preparing to have a big party when he finally moves into the villa owned by the Japanese man, but before that a Treasury agent shows up in town, and rumor has it that Oliver is in some sort of trouble. He feigns indifference, but it is evident to Augie that Stella is afraid of what might happen. She signals to Augie that she'd like to talk to him about it, but "Oliver watched her very closely." Oliver gets into more trouble when he discovers that Louie Fu, the owner of the Chinese restaurant where they often gather, is pouring the leftovers from orange soda bottles into a single bottle at the end of the day. "Oliver caught him and punched him in the face," and is hauled into jail for it. The city magistrate is not sympathetic to Oliver's defense "that what Louie had done was very dangerous because of the amoeba." The magistrate doesn't want word getting out that dysentery is rife in the town, so he gives Oliver a heavy fine. Stella, who is present in the court, "appealed to me with her large disturbed eyes to see for myself what she was up against."

When Thea hears about all of this, she suggests that they leave town and get away from the exiles until the summer tourist season is over. She wants to drive down to Chilpanzingo, "in the hot country." He tries to hedge: "Well, I think I may feel up to it soon." But Thea is determined to get away, and blames his slow recovery on his drinking. "You never touched a drop before you got down here." So he gives in: "I will go to Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world." But he wonders what he will do there.

Chapter XVIII

Before they can depart, however, Oliver's housewarming party takes place. Augie is eager to go, but he knows she doesn't. He rationalizes his forcing her to attend by thinking, "If I can stand her snakes, she can take this for one evening." But by the time they arrive at the party it's evident that it is turning into something of a wild rout, with guests passed out and empty tequila bottles floating in the fishpond. "Thea wanted to leave immediately, but as she began to say so I saw Stella by an orange tree. She made me a small sign, and I had to go and talk to her." Then Moulton comes up and asks Thea to dance, and although he knows she loathes Moulton and is angry with him for forcing her to come to the party, he leaves her on the dance floor and goes to find Stella. "But it did occur to me that the last time I had been called aside like this for a discussion apart was with Sophie Geratis, when we had fallen into each other's arms."

Stella tells him that the magazine Oliver edits had been bought with money from the Italian government, and the man who owns it has been arrested. "All the important things that were printed were planned in Rome." That's why the government agent has come for Oliver.  Stella doesn't know much more than that, except that Oliver wants to run away, perhaps to South America. Augie comments, "That poor fool! He thinks he's a big-league fugitive. You'll have to get away from him." He offers to lend her the money to leave, but she says she was hoping he'd take her to Mexico City himself. He tells her he can't do that, but that he can get her out of town.

He arranges to meet her with the station wagon, but when he goes to find Thea he finds she has left. Iggy tells him, "She was in quite a mood.... We looked for you. then she said to tell you she was pulling out for Chilpanzingo first thing in the morning. She was all nervous and shaking." So Augie goes to where the station wagon is parked and waits for Stella. The battery is low because the station wagon hasn't been driven for a while, and while he is trying to start it with a hand crank Thea shows up. He tells her that he is taking Stella to safety because "Oliver went crazy and tried to kill her today." Thea isn't buying it: "I've seen you with women. I know what you look like when a handsome woman or even not such a handsome woman passes by." They argue, and she suggests that they take Stella to their house to protect her. He digs in his heels but suggests that she come along. "I'll drive her up to Cuernavaca and we'll be back in a few hours." When she refuses, he starts the car and leaves.

The road to Cuernavaca is steep and dark. There is a detour when they get out of town, but the sign pointing the way has been tampered with and he can't tell which direction to take. He decides to go to the left, but the road gets worse and worse, and when he tries to back up to turn around, the engine dies. He gets out and discovers that they are on the edge of a steep mountain. There is no one around to help, and the crank no longer works to start the station wagon, so they take canvas and blankets out of the car and bed down for the night. Both of them give in to their impulses and make love. Augie reflects, "Thea foresaw that I'd do this. It annoyed me all the more with her, as though if she hadn't made the prediction it wouldn't have happened."

In the morning some men help them get the car turned around and when it starts to roll downhill the engine starts. They drive to Cuernavaca where he hires a car to take her to Mexico City and gives her all his money. She vows to pay him back, but he doesn't believe her.

Waiting in the sun for the taxi, we were at the side of the market, by the flowers, and stood where the stones were slippery from the cast-off blooms, just the light greasiness of the flowers underfoot. Facing us were the butchers' stalls, and on the hooks the tripes and lights and the carcasses were slung, on which the flies gave out nearly a roar and bounded like the first drops of cloudburst on a red wall. Under a chopping block squatted a naked kid and he slowly made a strange color of defecation. We went slowly around the broad steel gallery, the glass roof rising over the packed tinware, peppers, beef, bananas, pork, orchids, baskets, and this flash, rage, the chitin, electric loud tissue sound of fond love, the wild loving hum of the bluebottles and green. As if a huge spool were revolving that caught up all the threads from the sunlight.

Stella gives him the name of her theatrical agent who, she says, will always know where to reach her.

He returns to Thea and finds her ready to leave for Chilpanzingo. He tries to tell her about the car breaking down in the mountains, but she isn't interested in hearing it. He bitterly replies, "It wouldn't be so hard to tell you after what you've told me about yourself, about the Navy man and so forth, while you were married to Smitty. You're quite a few up on me." They reach an impasse on this subject, and she tells him that Oliver was picked up by the police at about the time he was leaving with Stella. Augie admits, "I guess I shouldn't have been in such a hurry. But I was afraid he'd drag her with him. Because he did have a gun, and he hit Louie Fu, he was getting to be violent and I though he'd force her --" But Thea just scoffs at the idea of Oliver forcing anyone, and suggests that Augie has been played by Stella.

Augie then delivers a cruel blow to Thea by revealing that he was just playing along with her on her hunting ambitions. She replies, "What, were you jut being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?" He tries to back down and claim that he never thought she was eccentric in her enthusiasms, but the damage has been done.

"I must be a little crazy." She said it in a husky and quite tone. "I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn't tire me, and so I wouldn't be afraid of them.... I was so happy to find you.... I'm sorry you're here now. You're not special. You're like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don't want to see you any more." 

She tells him that she is going to Chilpanzingo without him. And when she leaves, he goes berserk, demolishing the furniture and curtains and pictures in the house, and destroying the snake cages, watching "the panic of the monsters as they flowed and fled, surged for cover." He puts his things into a valise and goes into the village where, when he meets Moulton and Iggy, he curses them. But he follows Iggy into the market where, when Iggy sees his suitcase, he realizes what Augie has done. Augie bursts into tears.

11. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 758-796

Chapter XV

They are off on their Mexican adventure, but Augie at least realizes what an odd couple they are.

We had all the luck in love we could ask, and it was maybe improved by the foreignness we found in each other, for in some ways Danaë or Flora the Belle Romaine couldn't have been stranger to me, while only God can guess what sort of oddity out of barbarous Chicago I was to her. But these differences I think reduced the weight of precious personality and the veteran burden that familiarity is always a part of.

On the other hand, he admits, "Thea and I had our troubles. She kept me uncertain, as I did her." Part of his uncertainty stems from the fact that he can't believe that her husband is divorcing her because of that fling with the naval cadet. "I figured in those high-up social circles a falling-off here and there was not of such importance." She admits that it's not the only reason for the breakup, but doesn't elaborate. She just assures him that "we don't have to think about that. Because nothing like you has ever happened to me." Still, Augie is not without his doubts: "Sometimes I reckoned that mere jealousy of her sister had interested her in me in the first place."

And then "the gilded and dallying part of the excursion ended in Texarkana," when they pick up the eagle. It turns out to be "as big as the one in Chicago," to Augie's dismay. Thea loves it, but acknowledges that it "looks full grown and must weigh twelve pounds." Augie guesses more like thirty, but he defers to her judgment. He doesn't trust the man who's selling him, however: "I hadn't sered around Einhorn's poolroom or had Grandma Lausch's upbringing for nothing, and I recognized him for a crooked old bastard and prick in his heart." The eagle lashes out at them when they approach it, and Augie winds up with lacerations in his arm.

Somehow they manage to get the eagle loaded into their station wagon. "I hated him beyond measure, at the start. In the night we had to be up because of him, and it was an interference with love." But for Thea, "He was right away her absorption and idée fixe, almost child, and he made her out of breath." They ride on through the heat of Texas, and they begin the training.

But before the eagle would take the hood he had to be thoroughly mastered, and I carried him on my arm some forty hours without sleep. He wouldn't drop off, and Thea kept me awake. This was in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border.

When they they him out of the station wagon, a crowd gathers, and the children scream out, "El águilda, el águila!" To Augie it sounds like "Caligula," which becomes the eagle's name.

Augie persists in the training, and gets his hand slashed several times. Caligula has to be carried everywhere, and the crowds make him nervous. They even try taking him into a movie theater, but the sound there makes him worse. But finally he submits to having the hood put on him, which "made him more docile. Henceforth he rode either my fist or Thea's and took the hood without using his beak on us."

Left alone all night, he was vicious in the morning, and Thea was by now so wrapped up in his career that for the time very few considerations took precedence. Because she was making history.... She kept reminding me how few people since the Middle Ages had manned eagles. I agreed it was terrific and admired her without limit; I thanked God I was even her supernumerary or assistant.

The bird makes them travel slowly, and they spend some time teaching him to fly after a lure -- a piece of meat tied to a horseshoe on the end of a rawhide line.

They travel on southward, and Augie becomes impressed with the depth of the sky over Mexico. "I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath of silk membrane, showed the weight it held in sags." He admired Thea's "barbarous" look, and when she holds out her arm to receive the returning eagle, "I thought it was the most splendid human act I would ever see."

In Mexico City Thea has to see a representative for her husband's lawyer, and they stay a while in a cheap hotel that by night is "a house of assignation" -- "The closets were full of douche pans, the beds were heavily prepared with rubber under the sheets, which was an annoyance." But during the day they have the place to themselves, except for the maids. Augie is finding the experience eye-opening: "I thought the world was really much greater than I had ever fancied. I said to Thea, 'I don't actually know much, I begin to see.'" She asks, "how much are you obliged to know?" But he assures her there is a great deal.

As the training of Caligula continues, Augie begins to grow more attached to him: "He liked to be stroked with a feather. He became pretty tame, but all the same my heart picked up a few beats when we hooded him or struck the hood." They have the hotel maids line up and chatter with one another to get him used to human beings, which seems to work. Thea grows impatient to leave, so they can begin to train him hunt, and to accustom him to the presence of horses, which will be needed in the mountainous country where the giant iguanas are found, but she has to wait until she can see the lawyer.

"I assumed we'd get married when the divorce came through."

Chapter XVI

The chapter begins, unusually, with an epigraph from Antony and Cleopatra:

                                   And strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds.

They arrive at the house in Acatla, which as Augie reflects, he wasn't sure whether it belonged to Thea or to Smitty. "I thought I'd find out in due time." It is called "Casa Descuitada" -- Carefree House. They use the toilet as a mews for Caligula, perching him "on the waterbox or cistern where the sound of trickling seemed to please him. The bird fascinates the houseboy, Jacinto, though it terrifies his mother, who is the cook.

Acatla is not isolated. In fact, it has begun to attract a contingent of European exiles, "people who once went to Biarritz and San Remo but not wanted to be out of the way of politics." There is also a large American colony. Many of them congregate at the Carlos Quinto, a hotel next door managed by an Italian named da Fiori.

The time has come to train Caligula to catch lizards, and Jacinto is helpful in catching small ones for the training. Augie likes the lizards, which were easy to tame and actually grew affectionate after a while. "I wished we could leave them alone, thinking of that thunderous animal whose weight was on the toilet cistern, with his ripping feet and beak. But Thea mocks his sentimentality.

"Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up with everything, like a savage. Keep your silly feelings to yourself. Those lizards don't want them, and if they felt the way you do they wouldn't be lizards -- they'd be too slow, and pretty soon they'd be extinct." 

She isn't particularly sentimental where Augie is concerned, either. "Unlike Lucy Magnus, she never called me husband, or by any domestic term." He likens her to Mimi in her lack of conventional attitudes toward marriage.

The small lizards are easy prey for Caligula, and Augie dislikes seeing them eviscerated by the eagle. And then Jacinto brings them a larger lizard, which turns on the attacking bird and opens its mouth, showing "a tissue of rage to the big beast over it, then snapped its jaws and hung from the bird's thigh, curved with the force of its attack and bite." Caligula is startled, and when he has torn the lizard from his leg he hops away. "I couldn't show it, but it did my heart good to see Caligula offended." Thea, however, is enraged at the eagle: "Oh, the dirty bastard! We can't let him run away from a little bit of an animal like that. What'll we do? Augie, don't you grin about it." Augie claims the sun is in his eyes, making him squint. Even after the dead lizard has been brought to him to eat, Caligula refuses it, angering Thea further: "Oh, that damned crow! Get him out of my sight!" She also seems to blame Augie for the bird's lack of ferocity.

Augie begins to get acquainted with the village's European and American exiles, who are representatives of "Greenwich Village, or Montparnasse, or the equivalent from a dozen countries. There is a woman named Nettie Kilgore, a pair of writers from New York named Wiley Moulton and Iggy Blaikie, a man named Jepson who was the grandson of an African explorer as well as "the second husband of Iggy's first wife." There is also a young Mexican, Talavera, a "handsome brown strong young chap" who is the only one who realizes how capable Thea is of handling an eagle -- everyone else assumes Augie is the bird's master.

Thea hopes to get Moulton to help her with the articles she plans to write about training and hunting with Caligula, but he says he has all the work he can handle with his assignments for a pulp magazine published by a man named Nicolaides. "I had a bid to go up and interview Trotsky last month and I let it go because I'd rather write for Nicolaides." He suggests that Iggy might be able to write the articles, "but this recommendation everybody knew was a joke, because Iggy specialized in blood-curdlers for Doc Savage and Jungle Thrillers. He couldn't write anything else." Augie likes Iggy, whose real name is Gurevitch, because he's a familiar type: "He had a real poolroom look."

Ramon Novarro

He's not so sure about Talavera. "I wasn't experienced enough to be suspicious of the young man and native of the place who attaches himself to the foreign visitors, especially to women." He looks like Ramon Novarro, "both soft and haughty, and was said to be a mining engineer by profession; that was never proved but he had no need of work, his father was rich, and Talavera was a sportsman." Thea and Augie are renting horses from Talavera's father, but they have trouble finding horses that don't shy around Caligula. Finally they find an old one named Bizcocho "who had been through the Zapatista rebellion and wounded in guerrilla battles."

They go to a plateau to practice with Caligula, and his performance pleases Thea. So a few days later they go into the mountains to hunt the giant lizards. They "were really huge, with great frills or sails -- those ancient membranes.... These beasts were as fast and bold as anything I had ever seen." Jacinto is there to drive the lizards out of cover and into a stony slope. Caligula spots one and makes his dive.

I saw the two sharp fierce faces, and as Caligula put his foot on the monster it opened its angular mouth with strange snake rage and struck the eagle in the neck. Jacinto cried, and Thea even shriller, at this sight. Powerfully Caligula shook, but only to get free. The iguana dropped and fled, glittering its blood on the rocks. Thea yelled, "After him! Get him! There he goes!" But the eagle didn't pursue down the slope; he landed and stood beating his wings. When the thrashing of the lizard couldn't be heard any more he folded them. He didn't fly to me.

Furious, Thea yells at Caligula, "You stinking coward! You crow!" and begins to throw rocks at him. Augie runs to stop her, afraid that Caligula will turn on her, and when she keeps throwing stones he gets the shotgun, to keep her from using it on the eagle. Finally the bird flies off. Augie tries to console Thea, who is now crying in rage and frustration. To himself, Augie reflects that "it was hard to take this from wild nature, that there should be humanity mixed with it; such as there was in the beasts that embraced Odysseus and his men and wept on them in Circe's yard."

They are certain that Caligula has flown away from good, but when they get home he is on top of the shed. Thea is finished with him, she says, but Augie feeds him and becomes "his sole custodian." Because he comes down with a case of dysentery and can't stray far from the house, Augie sees more of the eagle than he really wants to. Thea spends most of her time in the darkroom developing the photographs she has taken along the way. Augie finds an old book to read: "It contained Campanella's City of the Sun, More's Utopia, Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels." A rainy spell limits his ability to exercise Caligula, and Augie is able to immerse himself in "all that boldness of assumption and reckoning." Thea, of course, has no interest in the book.

One day he puts on raingear and goes into the village on an errand for Thea, and meets up with Wiley Moulton and Iggy, who are drinking with a man named Oliver and his girlfriend, Stella, a beautiful young woman. Moulton gives Augie a nickname, Bolingbroke. He learns that word has gotten out about Caligula's failure. "I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and all other greater effort falls on its face." Oliver turns out to be a magazine editor, and Iggy suggests that he might be interested in the story of the eagle, but Oliver says the new owners of the magazine are only interested in political articles.

Augie goes back home "determined that we would not back down but fly Caligula and catch those giant iguanas." But Thea and Jacinto have gone out to hunt snakes, which she begins to collect, putting them in the cases that had been meant for the iguanas. "In time the porch became a snake gallery, so that the cook wanted to quit, fearing for her kid." But the snake-hunting also revives Thea's interest in the iguanas, so they take Caligula out again to the same spot.

Suddenly I got the idea of what it was to hunt, not with a weapon but with a creature, a living creature you had known how to teach because you'd inferred that all intelligences from the weakest blink to the first magnitude stars were essentially the same.

But just as Augie gets the signal from Thea to release the eagle, that the iguanas had been driven onto the rocky slope, he realizes that the place where he is riding is too steep for the horse. He finds himself going over the horse's head as Bizcocho tries to gain footing. "He was falling and so was I. I felt the push of Caligula's spring as he left my arm, and then I saw the color of my own blood on the slope of stones." Thea cries out for Augie to roll out of the way of the horse, who is kicking out trying to get up. "But one of Bizcocho's hoofs caught me square in the head and I was out."

10. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 739-757

Chapter XIV

Augie gives up his union-organizing job for Thea: "I just didn't have the calling to be a union man or in politics.... It wasn't what I was meant to be." But was he meant to be as head-over-heels in love with Thea as he is?

They fall into a passionate embrace in the elevator of her apartment house. "Not noticing the blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders. I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head, nearly blind." But Augie isn't the only blind one. When she finally notices the bruises from his beating, "the specific reason for my being beaten didn't interest her and she wasn't very curious about it."

Yes, she had heard of the big union drive, but that I was in it was sort of irrelevant. For while I was not with her, where I was intended to be, it didn't make much difference where I was. All intervening things and interferences were of the same unreal kind and belonged -- out there. 

And for the time being, Augie is the same way. "Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I didn't ask about them." He is only mildly surprised that she keeps money, cash and checks, in the refrigerator, "mixed up with rotting salad leaves and lying with saucers of bacon grease, which she didn't like to throw away." 

Gradually this blind infatuation -- "I loved her to the degree that anything she chanced to do was welcome to me" -- begins to allow reality to creep in. He learns that she is married, but is going to Mexico to get a divorce. Her husband is older and very wealthy. Esther, too, has married a rich man, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. Thea assumes that Augie will go with her to Mexico, and for the moment at least he is not inclined to refuse anything she asks of him.

He calls Grammick at the union offices. "He said the union guy and his boys were really gunning for me, to lay low," and although he is surprised when Augie tells him he's quitting, he admits that the conflict between the unions was "a lousy deal" to get involved in.

Thea starts outfitting Augie for the trip. "She wanted me to look like a sportsman," and buys expensive things for him, squandering money everywhere. Augie notices her foolish extravagances, but "It didn't matter. I let a lot of things go past.... I was never before so taken up with a single human being." He follows Thea's lead in everything, though occasionally is aware that he is "abandoning some mighty old protections."

Here Thea appeared with her money, her decided mind set on love and great circumstances, her car, her guns and Leicas and boots, her talk about Mexico, her ideas. One of the chiefest of these ideas being that there must be something better than what people call reality.

He recognizes "that she was used to having what she wanted, including me." Augie opens up to her about everything, but he sees that "she was in many ways suspicious." But she doesn't open up as completely.

She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn't tell whether she owned or rented a house in the town of Acatla, and what she described of the country didn't make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population.

They are, he learns, going to go hunting with eagles. "She had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Dan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas." They are going to stop on the way at a place near Texarkana where a man raises eagles. The iguanas are for a friend of her father's who has a private zoo. "As this information came out, which I didn't know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life -- I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity." (The vernacular touch of "without it should have" is a deft reminder that Augie is mostly self-taught.)

Their trip is delayed while Thea waits to hear from her husband's lawyer, and she spends part of the time giving Augie riding lessons. She also shows him an album of family photographs, including some of her husband, Smitty. Augie is struck by these pictures of a wealthy family at play, and finds it difficult to imagine himself fitting in with them. "And then the hunting troubled me. I didn't know how earnestly I was to take it."

He takes his uncertainties to Mimi, who is not exactly sympathetic, especially when he tells her about the eagle. "What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Arkansas? Don't you mean a buzzard?" He finds that Arthur has taken over his room, and has found the Harvard Classics under the bed. He asks to be allowed to take care of them, and since they have Arthur's father's name in them, Augie agrees. Arthur is undergoing treatment for his venereal disease. Augie also goes to see his mother, who asks if Thea is "a rich girl, like Simon's wife?" He wonders if she thinks he's still involved with Lucy Magnus, and assures her that she has nothing to do with Charlotte's family. She tells him that Simon has a new Cadillac. "Oh, it's wonderful! He's going to be a very rich fellow." Augie doesn't grudge him that, "But I have to admit that I couldn't keep down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too."

He also goes to see Padilla, who "wasn't so terribly pleased that I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province." Padilla gives Augie the name of a cousin in Mexico City, but isn't sure whether "he'll rob you or help." In fact, everyone gives him some sort of warning about the trip, so that he finally asks Thea, "Do we have to go to Mexico?" She could get divorced in Reno, he points out. But she tells him that she's already arranged with Smitty's lawyer to get divorced there.

Then she adds that there's another reason for going to Mexico: "I won't have much money after the divorce." He's astonished to hear this, and she explains that "our part of the family never did have much money." It's her uncle who has the money. And she adds that she caused a scandal by running away from her husband with a naval cadet who looked just like Augie. "I was thinking of you all the time, but you weren't there." So her uncle has put her "on probation." "And that's one more reason why I have to go to Mexico, to make some money." In addition to the lizard-catching eagles, she wants to make movies about hunting and "sell articles about it to the National Geographic."

Augie is floored. What about all the money they're spending now, he asks. She explains that "Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final." Despite all these revelations, Augie realizes "that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could put out my eyes" -- and that Thea knows it. She assures him that it will all be okay, but he is uncertain enough about the hunting part of it that he goes to the zoo to see their eagle. "How could anybody ever tame him? And also, We'd better make speed for Texarkana and start with this thing before it grows too big."

And so they set out on their journey.

9. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 710-738

Chapter XIII

Cut free by Simon, Augie holes up with his books and actually finishes the set of Harvard Classics. (Has anyone ever really done that?) He also sits in on university lectures with Kayo Obermark, but the effect is to make him decide against continuing his education there.

After all, when the breeze turned south and west and blew from the stockyards with dust from the fertilizer plants through the handsome ivy some of the stages from the brute creation to the sublime mind seemed to have been bypassed, and it was too much of a detour.

He lives for a while on the money Mimi is repaying him. She has stopped seeing Frazer and is now going with Arthur Einhorn. Augie gets a job with the WPA as a housing inspector, but the sordidness of the slums he visits disgusts him: "The different smells of flesh in all degrees from desire to sickness followed me." Then Mimi, who belongs to the restaurant workers' union, suggests he might go to work for the CIO, then in conflict with the other great union movement, the AFL. She introduces Augie to her union's organizer, a man called Grammick.

Augie goes to work for Grammick, though he "had an idea that my good impression wasn't all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with Mimi." He is quickly deluged with all sorts of demands for attention from union members, but he feels that he needs the hard work to recover from his "blowout with Simon." He is an odd fit with the workers he encounters.

I know I seemed too fresh and well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand up yelling rebellion.

One hotel whose workers he's trying to organize turns out to be owned by Karas, a cousin of Einhorn's. Augie drops in on Einhorn one day, and finds that his old employer has nothing against his job as an organizer. "Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same.... To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics."

Augie senses some tension in the Einhorn household, and the reason for it is revealed when Arthur Einhorn enters, and soon is followed by a small boy. "Arthur held it with the clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers." Thus Augie learns that Arthur has been married and divorced, but his congratulating Einhorn on being a grandfather is met with an air of "pale unhappiness." It turns out that the boy's mother "dumped him on us. She put him inside the door with a note and beat it, and then we had to wait for Arthur to come home and explain."

Poor Einhorn! At any hour of his decline he could formerly have taken out the gilt bond representing Arthur, and now the spite had come upon him that the value had gone, like that of Grandma's picture-watered czarist money. The gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of squalor.

Einhorn is also aware of Arthur's liaison with Mimi, and is none too happy about it. He plumbs Augie for information about her, but gets nowhere. Then he suggests that Arthur might find a job like Augie's.  "I could see Arthur stooping his weight on a desk in the union hall," Augie reflects, "one finger between the covers of his Valéry, or whatever he was interested in." So he passes the buck to Mimi, who had suggested him for the job.

Like Simon, Einhorn suspects that Augie and Mimi are lovers, and Augie keeps trying to persuade him of the truth. He is, in fact, involved with a woman named Sophie Geratis, a chambermaid at a luxury hotel, who came to him for help organizing the workers there. Sophie is engaged to be married in June, and Augie "thought she was being sensible, storing up pleasure so she wouldn't have any unfaithful craving once married."

Mimi has told Augie that a woman -- "A young lady and a very pretty one, prettier than" Sophie -- has come to the rooming house looking for him when he wasn't there. Augie wonders if it was Lucy Magnus, but the woman left no note for him. After he returns home he tells Mimi he has been to see Einhorn, who suggested finding a CIO job for Arthur. Mimi doesn't like Einhorn: "As soon as I was close to him for a minute he had his hand on my leg. I don't like these old men who think they're all sex." She knows about Arthur's son and resents Einhorn's attitude toward the boy. As for Arthur's ex-wife, she says, "I can't make out from Arthur whether she's a nice girl or a tramp. He's terribly vague unless discussing ideas. What kind of bitch would ditch a kid -- when she's already had it? Unless she's sick. In the head, you understand." She wants Arthur to move out of Einhorn's, but he hasn't any money -- and he has syphilis.

A few nights later, there's a knock on Augie's door when he's in bed with Sophie. He goes to see who it is, and it's Thea Fenchel. She hired a detective to track Augie down because she wants to talk to him about something. "I had thought back on her as an erratic rich girl with whom the main thing was to be rivals with her sister," Augie reflects. Thea apologizes for interrupting them. Augie turns to see Sophie getting dressed, and pleads with her to stay, but she's determined to leave. Thea slides a note under the door and goes away. It contains her address and phone number and asks him to call her tomorrow.

The next day at work Augie telephones Thea, but gets no answer. Grammick needs him to go to South Chicago to help him that night, and they're not finished until midnight. Augie calls Thea again and when she answers tells her that he's out of town and won't be back till tomorrow afternoon. She pleads for him to come, and tells him, "I don't have long to stay in Chicago." But when he gets back to the city there's an urgent situation at the Northumberland Hotel -- the place where Sophie works. She has called and left messages for Augie because there's a strike meeting, and the AFL is competing for the contract.

Augie finds the meeting and Sophie, who is one of the leaders of the rebels who want to go with the CIO, welcomes him. He climbs up on a barrel and tells the workers that their strike would be illegal and that the AFL would take their jobs. "The thing to do is sign with us so there can be an election, and when we win we can represent you." He hands out cards for them to sign. Then several men begin making their way through the crowd moving toward Augie. "Just as I realized that these were the enemy union guy and his goons I was grabbed from behind, off the barrel, and slugged as I landed, in the eye and on the nose. I burst into blood." A group of women gather around Augie, and Sophie shows him a firedoor he can escape through. As he leaves she says, "Augie, you and me will never get together again, will we?" He replies, "I think not, Sophie. There is this other girl."

Augie makes it down the fire escape, but he's pursued by one of the goons. He manages to get on a streetcar and make his escape, hides out in a movie theater until he's sure the coast is clear, and finally "jumped into a taxi and drove to Thea's, which had been my real objective of days."

4. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 525-554

Chapter VIII

Both Simon and Augie attend the city college, partly because there are no jobs to be had, and there they mix with the "children of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell's Kitchen, Little Sicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of Humboldt Park."

They filled the factory-length corridors and giant classrooms with every human character and germ, to undergo consolidation and become, the idea was, American. In the mixture there was beauty -- a good proportion -- and pimple-insolence, and parricide faces, gum-chew innocence, labor fodder and secretarial forces, Danish stability, Dago inspiration, catarrh-hampered mathematical genius; there were waxed-eared shovelers' children, sex-promising businessmen's daughters -- an immense sampling of a tremendous host, the multitudes of holy writ, begotten by West-moving, factor-shoved parents. Or me, the by-blow of a traveling man.

Actually, the March brothers are lucky enough to find jobs, both of them in a downtown clothing store. Simon has the better job, in men's suits, where he is expected to dress well, and exceeds expectations: He "was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck." Augie begins in the basement, "a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete." But he does well enough that he's soon promoted to the main floor. Simon is earning fifteen dollars a week, and Augie thirteen-fifty.

They hire a woman named Molly Simms, a "mulatto, ... a strong lean woman, about thirty-five," who sleeps on a cot in the kitchen. But on New Year's Day she doesn't show up and Simon doesn't come home until the evening of the next day, bruised, filthy, and scratched. He had gone out with Molly and got into a sequence of fights. So Molly is fired and replaced by "an old Polish woman who disliked us, a slow-climbing, muttering, mob-faced, fat, mean, pious widow who was a bad cook besides."

But Augie doesn't have to put up with her for long because he drops out of school and takes a job in Evanston, "selling things, a specialized salesman in luxury lines and dealing with aristocrats" in the wealthy Chicago suburbs. He had been recommended for the job by the shoe buyer. His new employer is a man named Renling, who owns a sporting goods store. Renling admits to Augie that "out there on the North Shore they don't like Jews. But ... who makes them happy? They like hardly anybody. Anyway, they'll probably never know." So he and Mrs. Renling take on the project of "glamorizing" Augie.

He is put to work in the saddle shop, selling "riding habits, boots, dude ranch stuff, fancy articles." And the Renlings make a "clotheshorse" out of him, dressing him "in the right taste for waiting on a smooth trade of mostly British inclination."

I have to marvel at my social passes, that I was suddenly sure and efficacious in this business, could talk firmly and knowingly to rich young girls, to country-club sports and university students, presenting things with one hand and carrying a cigarette in a long holder in the other. So that Renling had to grant that I had beat all the foreseen handicaps. I had to take riding lessons -- not too many, they were expensive.

It is Mrs. Renling who vows to make Augie "completely perfect," even to the extent of enrolling him in evening classes at Northwestern. Mrs. Renling is "pushing fifty-five," and "couldn't be interrupted or stopped, in her pale-fire concentration." Mr. Renling is all business, so he leaves the remaking of Augie in his wife's hands. He focuses his attention on competitiveness: "He was an obstacle-eater. He rushed over roads. He loved feats and worshiped endurance, and he took between his teeth all objections, difficulties, hindrances, and chewed and swallowed them down."

Augie has no clear ambition where business is concerned. "It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness." For a while, he dates a waitress, Willa Steiner, but Mrs. Renling disapproves, and even offers him money to go to brothels if he's looking for sex. She fears that he'll get Willa pregnant and marry her, which would put a crimp in her Pygmalion attempts to groom him. She even has him drive her to Benton Harbor, "where she took mineral baths for her arthritis," to get him away from Willa. There, he has breakfast with her every day because she doesn't like to eat alone. And he is forced to listen to her fierce analysis of the other people at the spa.

On the other hand, he enjoys living the life of a rich young man, and he falls in love with Esther Fenchel. He has everything that might attract a wealthy young woman: "good looks, excellent wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social ease, wittiness, handsome-devil smiles, neat dancing and address with women -- all in the freshest gold-leaf. And the trouble was that I had what you might call forged credentials. It was my worry that Esther Fenchel would find this out."

He approaches Esther by making friends with her uncle, who "drove a Packard, the same model and color as the Renlings'." He makes sure he parks near the uncle's car, so that they strike up a conversation about which car is which. He doesn't tell the uncle "that I earned twenty-five dollars a week and didn't own the car." Mrs. Renling notices that Augie is cultivating both the uncle and the aunt, who is "sickly, timid, and silent, with the mood of rich people whose health lets them down." But Mrs. Renling thinks that it's Esther's older sister, Thea, whom Augie has his eye on. She warns him that "the girl is not a waitress" and that he hasn't got a chance with her. But Augie, who really is in love with Esther, decides not to clue her in that it isn't Thea that he's pursuing.

Finally he makes the move and asks Esther to go dancing with him one evening. She replies, "With you? I should say not. I certainly won't." The rebuff is such a shock that he faints.

I got my back against a sofa, where I felt I had got trampled all over my body by a thing some way connected by weight with my mother and my brother George, who perhaps this very minute was working on a broom, or putting it down to shamble in to supper; or with Grandma Lausch in the Nelson Home -- somehow as though run over by the beast that kept them steady company and that I thought I was safely away from. 

At dinner Mrs. Renling notices something is wrong, and guesses at its cause, though she attributes it to the wrong sister. He is dreading Esther's entrance into the dining room, but her sister, Thea, arrives alone. Mrs. Renling observes, "the girl hasn't had her eyes off you since she came in." And she warns him, "You're too attractive to women for your own good, and you'll end up in trouble. So will she; she's got hot pants, that little miss." He leaves the dining room and goes out to the children's playground, where he sits on the garden swing to brood over his misfortune. And before long he is joined there by Thea Fenchel: "Disappointed that it isn't Esther, aren't you, Mr. March? I guess you must be having a terrible time. You looked pretty white in the dining room." She asks if he has recovered from his faint, which Esther thought might have been an epileptic seizure.

He tells her that he asked Esther for a date, and she tells him why Esther refused: "She thinks that you service the lady you're with." He jumps up in surprise so that that he bumps his head. Thea tells him that it doesn't bother her: "she's a European" -- Mrs. Renling was born in Luxembourg -- "and they don't think it's so terrible for a woman to have a much younger lover." Esther, her "deadhead of a sister," does object. Then Thea makes her move: "You've been in love with my sister and following her around, so you haven't noticed that I've done exactly the same to you.... Why don't you change to me?"

Augie makes a hasty escape. The next morning, there is a note for him from Thea: "Esther told her uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and then East. You were foolish last night. Think about it. It's true I love you. You'll see me again." Augie begins

to remember what very seldom mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage, and other history, things I had never much thought of as difficulties, being democratic in temperament, available to everybody and assuming about others what I assumed about myself.

Simon comes to see him with a girlfriend. "Taller than most, blond and brown, there was my Germanic-looking brother." His girlfriend, Cissy Flexner, is from the old neighborhood, and when they leave after the end of the day, Simon says, "Well, sport, we may be married in the next few months.... You envy me? I bet you do."