14. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 861-892

Chapter XXI

Augie makes his way back to Chicago with a detour to see his brother George who despite his mental handicap is "a man of fine appearance, as he had been a beautiful child." He is being trained as a shoemaker. After he leaves, he wishes he could find a way other than institutionalization for his brother: "I thought how quick we were to latch onto the excuse to deal practically with any element, like jailbirds, orphans, cripples, the weak-brained or the old." So he goes from the one institution to the other, the one where his mother lives. Simon has kept their mother supplied with everything that his money can buy, though his occasional visits are mainly to check to see if the money is being well-spent. "I knew how Simon could be when he was doing something for your good and welfare; he could make things hot."

Augie's mother frets about how thin he is, and urges him to see his brother, so Augie complies. Simon turns out to be eager to see him, and Augie "found out that I couldn't be critical of Simon when I saw him after a long interval. No matter what he had done or what he was up to now, the instant I saw him I loved him again." But he has no intention of telling him the full story of what had happened in Mexico. "I didn't say anything about the bird or my failures and lessons. Maybe I should have. He criticized me anyway in his mind for my randomness and sentiment."

But Simon really wants to talk about himself anyway, about how successful he has been and how much money he has made, buying and selling businesses. "Since he didn't want to have to do with the Magnuses he had gone into other kinds of business and he was very lucky." He tells Augie, "If I'm not a millionaire soon there's a hitch in my arithmetic." But of course now he wants to take Augie on as a project. They go to Simon's opulent apartment where Augie is forced to get rid of his old clothes and Simon dresses him in new and expensive ones. He has the old clothes thrown down the incinerator. They go to his office where Simon wheels and deals on an international scale: "He was in on a deal to buy some macaroni in Brazil and sell it in Helsinki. Then he was interested in some mining machinery from Sudbury, Ontario, that was wanted by an Indo-Chinese company." They go to Simon's club where "he forced his way into a poker game. I could tell he was hated, but no one could stand up to him" as he slanders the other players.

Augie asks why he wants to make them hate him, and Simon replies, "Because I hate them. I want them to know it." So why does he belong to a club with people he hates?  "Why not? I enjoy being a member of a club." (Which is the flip side of Groucho Marx's line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would let him in.)

On the way home they pick up Charlotte, "grimly handsome and immense." Then Mrs. Magnus arrives, and Augie witnesses the bizarre relationship of Simon and his mother-in-law. He nags her about her cheap clothes, and when she comes to the table he sits there reading the paper and ignoring her.

But suddenly Simon threw himself across the table, spilling the cherries and overturning coffee cups. He grabbed his mother-in-law's dress at the collar, thrust in his hand, and tore the cloth down to the waist. She screamed. There were her giant soft breasts wrapped in the pink band. What a great astonishment it was to see them! She panted and covered the top nudity with her hands and turned away. However, her cries were also cries of laughter. How she loved Simon! He knew it too.

He writes her a check ordering her to buy something that doesn't make her look like a scrubwoman. "He went and kissed her on the braids, and she took his head and gave his kisses back two for one and with tremendous humor."

Next Augie goes to see Einhorn, who is recovering from a prostate operation and is complaining about the relationship of his son with Mimi Villars. Mimi and Arthur are living together while Arthur works on a book. She has tried to help him get a job, but Arthur is incapable of holding one. Augie also visits Manny Padilla, who is not sympathetic when he hears about Augie's experiences in Mexico: "Holy Christ, March, what did you have to go there for, with a broad like that and a bird!" Augie protests that he was in love, but Padilla replies, "Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love -- or what good is it?"

Padilla diagnoses Augie's problem: "you're too ambitious. You want too much, and therefore if you miss out you blame yourself too hard." It's a familiar problem of Bellow's protagonists: Remember Henderson's "I want, I want" or Herzog's obsessions over Madeleine. Talking to Clem Tambow, Augie decides that his problem is his refusal to specialize: "Specialization was leaving the like of me behind. I didn't know spot-welding, I didn't know traffic management, I couldn't remove an appendix, or anything like that." Clem tells him, "You have ambitions. But you're ambitious in general. You're not concrete enough. You have to be concrete. Now Napoleon was. Goethe was."

"You can't adjust to the reality situation. I can see it all over you. You want there should be Man, with capital M, with great stature. As we've been pals since boyhood, I know you and what you think. Remember how you used to come to the house every day? But I know what you want. O paidea! O King David! O Plutarch and Seneca! O chivalry, O Abbot Suger! O Strozzi Palace, O Weimar! O Don Giovanni, O lineaments of gratified desire! O godlike man!" 

So far, Augie admits, he has found only one specialization: He trained a bird. "I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn't much hope if you had to be a specialist.... And besides specialization means difficulty, or what's there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla's slogan of 'Easy or not at all.'"

Mimi puts him on to a job opportunity that she had found for Arthur, but he doesn't want to be tied down by it: "there was a millionaire engaged in writing a book and he was looking for a research assistant." Augie needs the money: He has finally heard from Stella, but she tells him she is unable to repay his debt just yet -- she will when she finds a job, she promises. So Augie goes to see the millionaire, a man named Robey, who had been one of Frazer's students when Frazer was teaching. "Arthur said the book was to be a survey or history of human happiness from the standpoint of the rich." Augie is justifiably skeptical, but he doesn't want to be dependent on Simon, so he goes to see Robey.

The house sits on a lakefront, and is lavishly and eccentrically furnished. There is a portrait of Robey's mother, who "looked demented and wore a crown, a scepter in one hand and a rose in the other." Arthur has told Augie that she believed "she was the queen of Rockford, Illinois.... She had a throne. She expected everyone in town to bow to her." Though he is afflicted with a stammer, Robey rambles on about his plans for the book. "I thought, Oh, what a crazy bastard! What kind of screwloose millionaire have they sent me to?" But he decides to go through with it, and after some haggling gets Robey to agree to pay him thirty dollars a week for thirty hours work. "I was used to enthusiastic projects that would never leave the inventor's hangar. Like Einhorn's indexed Shakespeare back in the old days." (Or, he might have added, Thea's hunting trip.)

So he submits to Robey's reading assignments and twice-a-week conferences in which he reports on what he's read and answers Robey's questions. "In the autumn he lost his grip on himself. He went on giving me assignments and I collected my thirty bucks with a free conscience, but he didn't do any work." Robey comes to depend on Augie for some kind of stability. "But he gave me a rough time just the same. He was very sensitive and wanted my good opinion; however, he was extremely variable, humble one minute and making sure of his money's worth the next, or yelling or being sullen, sticking out his big red mouth in unhappiness or anger."

His even more eccentric sister, Caroline, also lives in the mansion. "She was screwy. And when she found I had been in Mexico she took a shine to me, believing herself Spanish." But Augie reflects, "I had taken care of my brother George. That ability or quality was with me yet, and sometimes people sensed it. Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too."

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."

6. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 584-612

Chapter X

Augie gets home to find that strangers have moved into his mother's apartment: Simon has sold the furniture to a Polish family and moved their mother into a room with the Kreindls downstairs. Augie gets another blow when he sees his mother and she tells him of Grandma's death.

He asks Mrs. Kreindl about what made his brother do such a thing, but she's unable to tell him anything useful. He goes to Einhorn's, and on the way meets Coblin and Five Properties, who tell him that Five Properties is getting married. It's Passover, and they try to get him to come with them to a Seder, but Augie hasn't washed after his ordeal on the road, and is eager to see Einhorn to solve the mysteries of what Simon has done.

He's afraid Einhorn is going to chew him out for getting involved with Gorman again, but he doesn't:  "I must have looked too sick -- low, gaunt, pushed to an extreme, burned." Einhorn does ask him why he had to bum his way back home: "Your brother told me he was sending you the money to Buffalo." Einhorn had loaned Simon the money for Augie, and made another loan to Simon himself.

Augie's anger at his brother increases with this revelation, and he learns that Simon had got mixed up with a betting pool, and got beat up when things went bad. He wanted the money so he could get married, but Einhorn tells Augie that won't happen now: Five Properties is marrying Simon's girlfriend. And when Simon heard the news, he went to the home of his girlfriend's father, caused a scene, and was thrown in jail. Simon spent one night there and was released when no charges were filed. Einhorn's opinion is that Simon deserved it, but Augie breaks down in tears at the extent of the mess that has been made.

Einhorn gives him a place to stay for the night, and assures him that he'll work something out for his mother. He searches for Simon the next day, but is unable to find him. He meets with Kreindl, who says, "you can see what kind of a man your brother is, that when he gets it in his mind he can sell the goods of the house and put his mother out." Augie assures him that he'll make arrangements for his mother.

He finds a place for his mother at a home for the blind, which costs fifteen dollars a month. He goes to his old room on the South Side and takes his good clothes to a pawnshop, moves his mother to the home, and starts looking for work. Einhorn locates a job with a "luxury dog service," which picks up the pets of wealthy people and takes them to a place where the dogs are "entertained as well as steamed, massaged, manicured, clipped," and are "supposed to be taught manners and tricks." The fee is twenty dollars a month, which as Augie observes, "was more than I had to pay for Mama in the Home." The job is tiring, and at the end of the day he smells so strongly of dog that people move away from him on the streetcar. It also involves going to the homes of people in the class to which he would have belonged if he had agreed to be adopted by the Renlings.Simon continues to elude him, and doesn't answer the messages he leaves for him with his mother and other people.

He still has "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf," his set of the Harvard Classics that Einhorn had given him after the fire. He is reading Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Conservation of Force one day while waiting for streetcar when a man he had known during his college studies, Manny Padilla, sees him. Padilla had been a whiz in the math class they took together, and is now at the university on a math and physics scholarship. "I wash dogs," Augie tells him.

Padilla tells him he should go back to school: "Don't you see that to do any little thing you have to take an examination, you have to pay a fee and get a card or a diploma?" Augie tells him he doesn't have the money, but Padilla explains that he's "in a racket swiping books," which supplements his tuition scholarship. He takes orders from students for textbooks, steals them from the bookstore, and sells them cheaply. "What's the matter, are you honest?" Padilla asks. Augie replies, "Not completely." Padilla explains that he plans to quit as soon as he can afford it. He goes into bookstores carrying one of his own books, which he puts down on top of the one he wants to steal. Then if he's stopped, he can explain that he absent-mindedly picked up the stolen book with his own. He never hides them in his coat, because that would be hard to explain away.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Misanthrope, 1598 (Source)

There's an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of rule. Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous wise are in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one, they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm; it is a flat place.

So Augie and Padilla become friends and accomplices, even sharing the favors of two black girls of Padilla's acquaintance. And Augie picks up a phrase from Padilla: "Either this stuff comes easy or it doesn't come at all." Augie interprets this to mean, "People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing." But Augie also doesn't intend to make larceny his profession: "I didn't mean to settle down to a career of stealing even if it were to come easy, but only to give myself a start at something better."

They decide that Augie will concentrate on books in the humanities, while Padilla continues to filch math texts and technical books. Augie is queasy about his first theft, a copy of Jowett's Plato, but he gets used to it. When he is in a store like Carson Pirie or Marshall Field, he says, "it never entered my mind to branch out and steal other stuff." Soon he is able to quit his dog-club job, but his problem is that he "was struck by the reading fever. I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man. Sometimes I couldn't give a book up to a customer who had ordered it, and for a long time this was all I could care about."

Padilla is upset when he discovers that Augie is keeping stolen books in his room, and that he holds out on customers until he finishes the books, some of which are very long. He tells Augie he can use his library card and borrow from the library. "But somehow that wasn't the same. As eating hour own meal, I suppose, is different from a handout, even if calory [sic] for calory it's the same value; maybe the body even uses it differently."

I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else -- that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of  organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and all the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.

But then the "daily fact" of Simon reenters his life. Seeing Augie's monastic life allows Simon to assume the upper hand in their relationship when he comes to repay the five dollars he owes Augie. And Augie is unable to follow Einhorn's advice to be hard on his brother. He forgives Simon for not sending the money he needed -- "he'd been in dutch." He forgives him for evicting their mother from the old flat: "we couldn't have kept the old home going much longer and set up a gentle kind of retirement there for Mama, neither of us having that filial tabby dormancy that natural bachelors have." He observes that Simon has grown fat. "However, it wasn't comfortable-looking fat but as if it came from not eating right."

Simon mocks Augie's bookishness: "So you must be in the book business. It can't be much of a business though, because I see you read them too. Leave it to you to find a business like this!" But Augie observes that "there was a dead place where the scorn should have rung." And Simon admits that he hasn't done so well with his life either. He breaks down and admits his mistake in getting mixed up with mobsters, and is filled with regret and disgust at his girlfriend's marrying Five Properties. And he tells Augie that he thought of committing suicide when he spent the night in jail. "This reference to suicide was only factual. Simon didn't work me for pity; he never seemed to require it of me."

But he hedges on the specifics of his current life, telling Augie only that he lives on the Near North Side, and ducking the question of what he's doing for a living. "He had been a fool and done wrong, he showed up sallow and with the smaller disgrace that he was fat, as if overeating were his reply to being crushed -- and with this all over him he wasn't going to tell me, he balked at telling, some small details." But then he says, "I think I'm getting married soon.... To a woman with money." He hasn't even seen her yet, but he thinks, "She's about twenty-two." The marriage is being arranged by his former boss. When Augie says this sounds "cold-blooded," Simon objects: "how can you pretend to me that it makes a difference that Bob loves Mary who marries Jerry? That's for the movies."

Augie stifles the complex of feelings and thoughts that his brother's cynicism arouses in him, and asks why this rich woman wants to marry him. Simon treats it entirely as a business proposition: "Well, first of all we're all handsome men in our family." And, "I'm not marrying a rich girl in order to live on her dough and have a good time. They'll get full value out of me, these people." And, "I have to make money. I'm not one of those guys that give up what they want as soon as they realize they want it. I want money, and I mean want, and I can handle it. Those are my assets. So I couldn't be more on the level with them."

Her name is Charlotte Magnus, he tells Augie, who recognizes Magnus as the name of a coal business. Simon tells him that he's going to ask for a coal yard as a wedding present. And he has come to Augie because he needs a family presence on his side. So Augie agrees to get his good clothes out of hock to play brother of the groom.

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

Chapter IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter VI


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                          

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

Chapter IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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