2. Dangling Man, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 52-89

December 27 through January 26 

_____

The morning after the scene at his house, Amos telephones, but Joseph has Iva talk to him. His excuse for rummaging through Dolly's dresser has been confirmed when they found the hundred-dollar bill pinned to the pillow cover. Iva asks why he didn't defend himself at the time, but he replies that he didn't care what they thought of him. He admits to his journal, however, that he was relieved: "I had been uneasy about the money, believing that Etta was not above taking it." He expresses no remorse, however, about his assault on the girl. Instead, he reflects again on their physical resemblance. 


This thought touches off a memory of his "self-willed" Aunt Dina, who had taken him for his first haircut -- against his mother's wishes -- when he was four years old. And then, in his adolescence, he discovered a photograph of his grandfather in the same drawer in which his mother kept an envelope of the curls that had been shorn that day: "it occurred to me that this skull of my grandfather's would in time overtake me.... Still later I came to believe ... that the picture was a proof of my mortality. I was upright on my grandfather's bones and the bones of those before him in a temporary loan.... Through the years he would reclaim me bit by bit." 


He had prided himself on being handsome, but in high school he made friends with a German boy named Will Harscha. One day, he met Will's father and mother: 

"So this is Joseph," he said as he shook hands with me. "Well. Er ist schön," he said to his wife. 
"Mephisto war auch schön," Mrs. Harscha answered.

Shocked at being compared to Mephistopheles, believing that Mrs. Harscha "had seen through me," he broke off his friendship with Will. Later he decided that she may have heard of his habit of buttering up his friends' mothers. "She may have thought I had no business being unboyish. Many people resented this." 


Several days go by without incident until Mr. Vanaker, who "observed the birth of the new year with large quantities of whisky, with coughing, pelting the yard with bottles, with frequent, noisy trips to the lavatory," sets an armchair in his room on fire, causing much commotion in the rooming house. Otherwise, Joseph observes, "days have lost their distinctiveness." He thinks that this may be "one reason why I have been creating agitation. I am not sure. The circumstances at the Arrow [the restaurant where he was snubbed by Jimmy Burns] and at Amos's house were provoking enough, but I could have avoided making scenes if I had wished." 

Trouble, like physical pain, makes us actively aware that we are living, and when there is little in the life we lead to hold and draw and stir us, we seek and cherish it, preferring embarrassment or pain to indifference.

One day he sees a newspaper item about a man named Jefferson Forman whose plane was shot down in the Pacific. He decides that this must be the Jeff Forman he had known in college. He recalls several incidents he had heard about Forman that suggest to him that "Jeff was in love with excitement." So Jeff Forman becomes symbolic to Joseph of everything that he is not: "I always suspected of him that he had in some fashion discovered there were some ways in which to be human was to be unutterably dismal, and that all his life was given over to avoiding those ways." As to his own future involvement in the war, he reflects that he "would rather die in the war than consume its benefits." 


He spends a day shining all the shoes in the closet -- though it's not clear whether this is consciously or unconsciously motivated by the concern of his brother Amos and his family with not being able to buy more than four pairs of shoes a year. It was something he had done as a child in Montreal.

I did not clean shoes because I was praised for it, but because of the work and the sensations of the room, closed off from the wet and fog of the street, with its locked shutters and the faint green of the metal pipes along the copings of its houses. Nothing could have tempted me out of the house.

He recalls the sights of the slum area of Montreal in which he lived as a child: "I sometimes think it is the only place where I was ever allowed to encounter reality." (Bellow will explore this theme later in Herzog.) 


Morris Abt sends Joseph a pamphlet he has written as part of his work for the government, but it stirs up Joseph's resentment at Abt for being productive while he is idle. They had been roommates as freshmen at the University of Wisconsin, but Abt "lived continually in need of being consequential," stirring Joseph's insecurity: "Living with him had a bad effect on me, for I withdrew from any field he entered." 

He would never admit that he wanted to become another Locke, but there he was, wearing himself thin with the effort of emulation, increasingly angry at himself, and unable to admit that the scale of his ambition was defeating him.

Joseph sees this individual ambition as a modern disease. "Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be. Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him.... Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on." The result has been a steady decline in civilization: 

From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had that right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions; to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could be great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen. Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. 

Joseph has a letter from another friend, John Pearl, who works for an advertising agency in New York, though he wants to be an artist: "The real world is the world of art and thought. There is only one worth-while sort of work, that of the imagination." But this only stirs Joseph's thoughts of his own lack of talent: "Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute for the imagination?" Despite Pearl's disillusionment with being trapped in a job he scorns, Joseph maintains that Pearl can at least "keep a measure of cleanliness and freedom" because through his "acts of the imagination ... he is connected with the best part of mankind. He feels this and he can never be isolated, left aside. He has a community. I have this six-sided box." 


The correspondence with his friends has brought out Joseph's self-pity: "I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail." 

Iva is looking for a book, Dubliners, that Joseph recommended she read. She can't find it anywhere. Then "suddenly I remembered that I had lent Kitty Daumler a book." We have heard Kitty's name earlier, in passing, when Joseph said he went out to see her sometimes without Iva's knowledge, so we sense that there are reasons why Joseph wants to persuade Iva that the book must be there somewhere. Iva persists, however, and even suggests that Vanaker must have stolen it. The tension over the book leads to an argument that ends with Joseph storming out: "I shut the door with a crash, already aware, under my anger, that this was beneath me and altogether out of proportion to the provocation." 


As he leaves, Vanaker opens his window and throws out an empty whiskey bottle that lands among dozens of others in the bushes. Joseph hails a streetcar and goes to Kitty's. "My purpose was not to retrieve the book -- though, of course, I might as well ask her to return it while I was there --n but to see Kitty." 


They had met two years earlier, when Joseph had arranged a tour of the Caribbean for her at the travel agency. They flirted a bit, though he made it clear that he was married. "For her, she said, marriage as such did not exist. There were only people." A month later, she came by the agency again and invited him to "have supper together." He accepted in part because he and Iva had not been getting along; she resented his dominance in the marriage and he had begun to find her intellectually frivolous.

There are such things as clothes, appearances, furniture, light entertainment, mystery stories, the attractions of fashion magazines, the radio, the enjoyable evening. What could one say to them? Women -- thus I reasoned --- were not equipped by training to resist such things.

So he began seeing Kitty frequently, just for conversation. "I had learned to discern the real Kitty, the lively, plump, high-colored, scented, gross girl, behind the talk.... Beyond talk, however, Kitty and I did not go." But then one night he found her "in bed, drinking rum and tea. She had been caught in the rain and chilled." And the affair began. It lasted for two months, "or until she began hinting at my leaving Iva." So he "began to bring the affair with Kitty to a close.... We agreed that I was to continue visiting her on a friendly basis." He saw her off and on, but it had been some time since he had done so when the argument about the book took place. 


He goes to Kitty's, but another man is there. "She was not, of course, delighted to see me," though she "did not seem at all displeased at having been found out." As they talk at her door, he sees a man's shirt hanging on a chair. "She looked behind, and then turned to me with a smile, but half in contempt, as much as to say, 'It isn't my fault that that isn't your shirt hanging on the chair.'" She agrees to look for the book and mail it to him. He leaves, realizing that "while I could objectively find no reason why she should not do as she pleased, I found myself nevertheless ambiguously resentful and insulted." 


He goes home to find Iva waiting up. "In the morning we had a short talk and were reconciled." The book arrives in the mail a couple of days later and he decides to pretend to find it that night. "I hope that will be the last deception imposed on me." A characteristically passive attitude. 


On the street he runs into Iva's cousin, Sam Pearson, who grills him on what he has been doing. The answer, of course, is "Absolutely nothing," which sets off Joseph's resentment: "He has always, b his questions, exercised a social or family tyranny over me, checking on my suitability for Iva. No doubt he will report this to the Almstadts. 


A visit to a tailor, Mr. Fanzel, to have a button sewed on gives Joseph a lesson in capitalism: "A year ago Mr. Fanzel sewed a button to my coat gratis; this year he charged fifteen cents." Many of his customers who were once on relief are now employed in the defense industry. But since the cost of his supplies has gone up, too, he now charges them more, "charging eighty dollars for suits worth forty and fifteen cents for a button he formerly sewed out of kindness," as Joseph somewhat naively puts it. "I blame the spiritual climate," Joseph says, somehow linking what he sees as greed with "the shadow of Jeff Forman's falling plane." For Joseph, the fifteen cents he pays Fanzel represents "three cups of coffee, or three cigars, or a glass-and-a-half of beer, or five morning papers, or something less than a package of cigarettes, or three telephone calls, or one breakfast." He goes without the breakfast because of "Iva's check at the library having been held up." 


One morning he watches the maid, Marie, clean the windows and turns it into a  lesson about human nature and "a notion of center, of balance, of order":
A woman learns it in the kitchens of her childhood, and it branches out from sinks, windows, table tops, to the faces and hands of children, and then it may become, as it does for some women, part of the nature of God.


A schoolfriend of Iva's, Susie Farson, comes over in distress because of the abuse she and her baby, Barbara, have been experiencing at the hands of her husband, Walter. Iva urges Susie to leave him. 


January 26 is Joseph and Iva's sixth wedding anniversary and they meet for dinner. But on the way Joseph witnesses a man collapse. Joseph helps open the man's collar before the police arrive to take over. Something about the event recalls the night of his mother's death. His Aunt Dina hysterically threw herself on her sister's body, and when Joseph tries to restrain her, "she lashed at me, clawing with enraged fingers," claiming that her sister had been trying to say something before she died. "To many in the fascinated crowd the figure of the man on the ground must have been what it was to me -- a pre-vision. Without warning, down." He doesn't tell Iva about the man or his memory, but it casts a shadow over the anniversary celebration nevertheless. 


Susie Farson returns to tell them that her husband has been accepted to a radio training course in Detroit and that they are going to leave their baby with her husband's sister. Iva is appalled. "Mr. Vanaker was raking his throat, coughing, halting with a fleshy catch and coughing again. Any disturbance in our room sets him off. He did not stop until Iva, with a show of temper unusual for her, banged on the wall with her slipper." 


They have dinner with the Almstadts and Joseph learns that "Cousin Sam has not reported me." They have also accepted an invitation to his father's because Joseph's stepmother has been offended by their declining so many invitations. 


Joseph comes down with a cold, and Iva takes the afternoon off to nurse him. Joseph reflects, 

Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death.... The result is that we learn to be unfeeling toward ourselves and incurious. Who can be the earnest huntsman of himself when he knows he is in turn a quarry? Or nothing so distinctive as quarry, but one of a shoal, driven toward the weirs. 

He has dreamed of being shown the victims of a massacre, one of whom has a name ending in "Tanza. It must have been Constanza." In the dream, which he thinks may have been the result of viewing pictures of the pogrom in Bucharest in 1941, he tells the guard that he doesn't know the deceased. "He approved of my neutrality. As long as I took the part of the humane emissary, no harm would come to me." Finally, the dream produces in him "an atmosphere of terror such as my father many years ago could conjure for me, describing Gehenna and the damned until I shrieked and begged him to stop." And he continues to remember "the syllables Tanza." 


There are other "slightly less dreadful" dreams in which he is fighting in North Africa. And he wonders, "Could the fallen man of last week have seen, had he chanced to open his eyes, his death in the face of that policeman who bent over him? We know we are sought and expect to be found. How many forms he takes, the murderer."

How will it be? How? Falling a mile into the wrinkled sea? Or, as I have dreamed, cutting a wire? Or strafed in a river among chopped reeds and turning water, blood leaking through the cloth of the sleeves and shoulders? I can safely think of such things on a bright afternoon such as this. When they come at night, the heart, like a toad, exudes its fear with a repulsive puff.... "God does not love those who are unable to sleep soundly," runs an old saying. 

He and Iva watch the sunset. "Her hand was cool and sweet. I had a slight fever."  

1. Dangling Man, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 1-52

December 15, 1942 through December 26 

_____

Because he was born in Canada, Joseph's induction into the U.S. Army has fallen into a bureaucratic limbo. With nothing but time on his hands -- it has been seven months since he quit his job at the Inter-American Travel Bureau, expecting to be inducted immediately -- he has begun to keep a journal, which is the narrative vehicle for the novel. He is self-conscious about the journal -- "to keep a journal nowadays is considered a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste" -- but then he's self-conscious about almost everything. The journal is, in fact, his one way of confronting the existential nothingness of his life: "The hard-boiled are compensated for their silence: they fly planes or fight bulls or catch tarpon, whereas ... I am alone ten hours a day in a single room." 


He and his wife, Iva, live in a rooming house with "the standard rooming-house annoyances: cooking odors, roaches, and peculiar neighbors." She supports him with her job, and "claims that it is no burden and that she wants me to enjoy this liberty, to read and to do all the delightful things I will be unable to do in the Army." One of them would be to continue working on a series of "essays, mainly biographical, on the philosophers of the Enlightenment," that he had begun about a year earlier. But he has quit work on that. Although Iva brings him books, he says, "I find myself unable to read. Books do not hold me." 


They no longer see their friends in Chicago, so Joseph sits "idle in my room, anticipating the minor crises of the day, the maid's knock, the appearance of the postman, programs on the radio, and the sure, cyclical distress of certain thoughts." He has thought of going back to work, but the prospect of having to leave the job when he is finally called up has stymied that move. 

There is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited. It is perfectly clear to me that I am deteriorating, storing bitterness and spite which eat like acids at my endowment of generosity and good will. But the seven months' delay is only one of the sources of my harassment. Again, I sometimes think of it as the backdrop against which I can be seen swinging. It is still more. Before I can properly estimate the damage it has done me I shall have to be cut down.

Bellow's Dangling Man is not unlike Dostoevsky's Underground Man, trapped in a vicious circle of inertia that feeds his "bitterness and spite." And his name, Joseph, echoes that of the victim of bureaucracy in Kafka's The Trial. 


Joseph is also the victim of his own imagination: "In the middle of winter, isolating a wall with sunlight on it, I have been able to persuade myself, despite the surrounding ice, that the month was July, not February. Similarly, I have reversed the summer and made myself shiver in the heat." Now, he has persuaded himself that he is rooted to his chair: "It is a real, a bodily feeling. I will not even try to rise." But he realizes that when the maid, Marie, comes to clean the room, he will get up and go to the store. 


He goes out, he says, at most four times a day: thrice for meals and an occasional fourth time for some "contrived errand or on some aimless impulse." Sometimes, he says cryptically, he goes out without his wife's knowledge "to see Kitty Daumler." But on all his excursions he tries to avoid running into people he knows, or even to be seen too frequently in the same place, for fear that he'll attract attention. He reads the newspaper "from end to end, ritualistically, missing not a word," starting with the comic strips. And when he finishes it, he says, "I even reread the comics to see if I have missed anything." 


When the maid arrives, "She has a cigarette in her mouth. I think I am the only one before whom she dares smoke; she recognizes that I am of no importance." Sometimes he listens to the radio, but he can't play it too loud because the landlady "has been bedridden for more than three months" and "is not expected to live very long." The rooming house is run by her daughter and her husband, Captain Briggs. 


Their next-door neighbor is a man, "a queer, annoying creature," named Vanaker. Joseph asserts that Vanaker "coughs to draw attention to himself." Iva has complained to Mrs. Briggs that "when he goes to the toilet he leaves the door ajar. He tramps down the hall, and a moment later you hear him splashing." Mrs. Briggs has posted a notice on the bathroom door asking that it be closed while in use. "So far it hasn't helped." The maid, Marie, says that she "has found half-smoked cigars ground out on the floors of unoccupied rooms" and suspects that Vanaker prowls about when the occupants are gone. 


One day, Joseph says, he was leafing through a copy of Goethe's Poetry and Life (presumably a translation of Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit) and was taken with this passage: 

All comfort in life is based upon a regular occurrence of external phenomena. The changes of the day and night, of the seasons, of flowers and fruits, and all other recurring pleasures that come to us, that we may and should enjoy them -- these are the mainsprings of our earthly life. The more open we are to these enjoyments, the happier we are; but if these changing phenomena unforld themselves and we take no interest in them, if we are insensible to such fair solicitations, then comes on the sorest evil, the heaviest disease -- we regard life as a loathsome burden. It is said of an Englishman that he hanged himself that he might no longer have to dress and undress himself every day.

Joseph read on, and came to the heading "Weariness of Life," but was disappointed to read: "Nothing occasions this weariness more than the recurrence of the passion of love." Recognizing the irrelevance to his own weariness, Joseph says, "I put the book down." 


One day, Iva asked Joseph to go to see her father, Mr. Almstadt, who had come down with a cold. "Iva, knowing how inept her mother is, asked me to go there and help out." He arrived to find things in "great disorder," and went up to see Almstadt. Meanwhile, he could overhear Mrs. Almstadt continually talking on the phone: "Her words showered down upon us like little glass pellets." But when he comments to Almstadt on this, his father-in-law gets angry at his presumption. Joseph remembers that Almstadt had said before to him, "Katy's still a child; she never grew up." But when he repeats this to Almstadt, it doesn't ease his anger. 


Joseph decides that Almstadt has reconciled himself to the situation: "Babble, tedium, and all the rest were to be expected; they came with every marriage." And then he thinks that perhaps his father-in-law "heard and delighted in her, wanted her slovenly, garrulous, foolish, and coy, took pleasure in enduring her." 


He agrees to go to the drugstore to fill a prescription for Almstadt, and on the way hears Mrs. Almstadt say on the phone, "My Iva's husband Joseph is here to lend a hand. He isn't working now, he's waiting for the Army, so he has all the time in the world." This makes Joseph angry, and he wonders "whether her thoughts were as smooth and contentless as counters or blank dominoes; whether she was half guile and half innocence; or whether there worked through her a malice she herself knew nothing about." When he returns to the house with the prescription, he decides not to enter into a conversation with the Almstadts: "If I began to talk I would soon find myself explaining my position and defending my idleness." 


Before he leaves, he looks out of the window of the Almstadts' living room and reflects on the ugliness of what he sees: "Where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man's favor?" He feels alienated from the human lives that he sees in the "billboards, streets, tracks, houses, ugly and blind." He thinks of the people reflected in his reading of the newspaper: "In their businesses and politics, their taverns, movies, assaults, divorces, murders, I tried continually to find clear signs of their common humanity." They were all caught up in history, he reflects. 

And if, as was often said, this part of the century was approaching the nether curve in a cycle, then I, too, would remain on the bottom and there, extinct, merely add my body, my live, to the base of a coming time. This would probably be a condemned age. But ... it might be a mistake to think of it in that way.... The worlds we sought were never those we say; the worlds we bargained for were never the worlds we got.

In the next day's entry he reflects on what he was a year ago: a twenty-seven-year-old employee of the Inter-American Travel Bureau, "a tall, already slightly flabby but, nevertheless, handsome young man, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin -- major, History -- married five years, amiable, generally takes himself to be well-liked." He had been seventeen when he met Iva, and was then a member of the Communist Party. He is also, he thinks, "somewhat peculiar ... even his oldest friends, those who like John Pearl and Morris Abt have been close to him since boyhood, often find it hard to make him out." And he acknowledges, thinking of himself in the third person, that "Joseph suffers from a feeling of strangeness, of not quite belonging to the world, of lying under a cloud and looking up at it." 


Returning to the present, Joseph goes out shopping in preparation for the holidays, though his view of the scene is hardly full of Christmas cheer: "bell-ringers ... in beards of soiled cotton and red Santa Claus costumes.... Immense wreaths were mounted on buildings in the green, menacing air; the thousands upon thousands of shoppers ground through the stores and the streets under the smoky red façades and in the amplified roar of carols." 


At the rooming house, "Vanaker is restless these days." He moves the furniture around and sometimes blocks the door with his bed, and Marie tells Joseph that he doesn't wash his underwear, he just hangs it in the window to air. Mrs. Briggs tells him that Vanaker is converting to Catholicism to get married, but Joseph notices that he also "receives large quantities of mail from the Masonic Scottish Rite. It may be this conflict of principle that drives him to get up at two in the morning to change the position of his bed." 


They have been invited to have Christmas dinner at both the Almstadts and Joseph's brother Amos. "I am for refusing both." 


His friend Myron Adler invites Joseph to have lunch to talk about a temporary job "asking people questions for a poll he is conducting." At the restaurant, Joseph sees a man, Jimmy Burns, whom he had known when they were both members of the Communist Party. But when Burns doesn't acknowledge Joseph's nod, Joseph takes offense. Adler doesn't understand why Joseph is so upset and vows, "I'm going to go up to him and say hello whether he likes it or not." He explains to Adler, "Simply because I am no longer a member of their party they have instructed him and boobs like him not to talk to me.... Forbid one man to talk to another, forbid him to communicate with someone else, and you've forbidden him to think, because, as a great many writers will tell you, thought is a kind of communication. And his party doesn't want him to think, but to follow its discipline." 


Joseph gets increasingly upset, as Adler tries to calm him down. He tells Adler that when he left the party, he wrote a letter to Jane Addams apologizing for the communist rejection of her brand of reformism. Finally he calls out, "Hey, Burns! Hey!" as Adler shushes him. "Burns glanced briefly in my direction and then resumed his conversation with the other man, who, however, turned ... to examine me." Adler tries to hustle Joseph out of the restaurant before he causes another scene, but as they leave, Joseph stops at Burns's table and confronts him. Burns acknowledges "in a low voice" that he knows Joseph, which satisfies him. 


Later, Joseph is repentant for his "sheer dishevelment of mind," and reveals that he fabricated the story about writing to Jane Addams. (An anticipation of Moses Herzog's many letters to famous people?)

But still, I could not condemn myself altogether for it. It was wrong to make a scene but, after all, it was not so wrong to be indignant at Burns. To have invented a letter to Jane Addams was, however, clearly wrong. Why on earth had I done that? ... Later, thinking these incidents over, I felt less inclined to shoulder all the blame.... For the insolence of Burns figured the whole betrayal of an undertaking to which I had once devoted myself.

The experience reminds him of a party he attended the previous March, which led to his present disillusionment with his friends. Again, for a moment, he objectifies himself as "Joseph, that creature of plans," who asked himself "How should a good man live; what ought he to do?" 

What he wanted was a "colony of the spirit," or a group whose covenants forbade spite, bloodiness, and cruelty.... The world was crude and it was dangerous and, if no measures were taken, existence could indeed become -- in Hobbes' phrase, which had long ago lodged in Joseph's mind -- "nasty, brutish, short." It need not become so if a number of others would combine to defend themselves against danger and crudity.

We see here why Joseph joined the Communist Party and why he broke from it: a longing for a community to take on the world, and a realization that communities are frangible because they're made up of human beings. 


The party was given by Iva's friend Mina Servatius, and Joseph goes reluctantly: "I liked nothing better than to see my friends singly or in pairs, but when they came together in a large group they disheartened me." He could predict what his friends would be like at the party, including "that Minna would have difficulties with her husband." 


They arrive late and Minna accuses them of doing so "when everybody's high so they can stand around and watch us make fools of ourselves." She proceeds to order people around, making them do things they don't want to do. Joseph finds out why when he asks Myron Adler, who tells him that Minna's husband, Harry, has been spending the evening talking to Gilda Hillman. 


When Iva asks Joseph to get her another drink, he worries that she'll get drunk, and when he sees her at the punch bowl later, he thinks about taking the glass away from her. But he continues to talk with Morris Abt, an old friend who recently got his doctorate in political science from Chicago. Their conversation is interrupted by a shrill laugh from Minna, and Joseph begins "to think what a gathering of this sort meant," which is "to free the charge of feeling in the pent heart." He likens it to the rites of Eleusis. "Only we did these things without grace or mystery, lacking the forms for them and, relying on drunkenness, assassinated the Gods in one another and shrieked in vengefulness and hurt. I frowned at this dreadful picture." 


When Harry Servatius and Gilda Hillman appear and begin dancing together, Minna orders Abt to hypnotize someone -- an old party trick that he says he has given up. She persists, and when no one else volunteers to be hypnotized, decides to have it done to herself. Joseph watches as Abt puts Minna under, but after several tricks she sits up and calls out for her husband. "Then she began to cry, her face fixed and bewildered." 


As people try to bring Minna around, the party disintegrates, and Joseph goes in search of Iva, whom he finds outside on the porch. He has a testy conversation with Jack Brill, a recent addition to their circle of friends who resents being treated as an outsider to the group. Then he calls a cab and takes Iva home, reflecting, "I thought that with one leap 'nasty, brutish, and short' had landed in our midst." He is disgusted by his friend Abt for participating in the hypnosis stunt, but also with his entire circle of friends: "I began to discover one weakness after another in all I had built up around me." In the following months, he separates himself from them, though he still occasionally corresponds with Abt, who has gone to Washington. 


After the incident with Burns, Myron Adler tells Joseph that the agency had decided to hire women for the polling job. 


Vanaker is drinking heavily and throwing empty pint bottles into the neighbors' yards. Joseph counts eighteen of them one day. Iva discovers that some bottles of perfume that she had been sent by their friend Ethel Pearl are missing, and assumes that Vanaker has stolen them. 


Iva accepts the Christmas dinner invitation from Joseph's brother Amos, who is twelve years Joseph's senior and has married into money. He had offered Joseph a position in his firm, and was disappointed when he "took what seemed to him a menial job." This led to a split between the brothers for a year, but Iva brought about a reconciliation. Amos and his wife, Dolly, have a fifteen-year-old daughter, Etta. Dolly and Etta remind Joseph of the haughty daughters of Zion in Isaiah, who "walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes," and whom "the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head ... and ... discover their secret parts." 

Certainly it is the "stretched forth necks," or delicacy in conjunction with the rugged ancient machinery of procreation, that has for a long time been identified in my imagination with feminine nature. Here the parallel ends, for I am the very opposite of vindictive in regard to this duality and have, indeed, found pleasure in recognizing it. 

But maybe not so much, as what follows suggests. For Joseph sees Etta as "a vain girl" and is "sure she spends a great many hours before the mirror." But what complicates matters is "that she must be aware of the resemblance she bears to me." He is annoyed by the family's complaints about shoe rationing: "We couldn't get along on four pairs a year." And after Iva says that Joseph "never buys more than one pair of shoes a year," he bristles at Etta's comment, "He isn't on his feet much." 


He also gets crosswise with Amos, when he says he won't go for officer candidate school when he finally is inducted: "As I see it, the whole war's a misfortune. I don't want to raise myself through it." Amos, who scorns his brother's lack of ambition, doesn't take well to this, especially when Joseph points out that "Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite." Later, when Joseph and Amos are alone together, Joseph refuses the hundred-dollar bill Amos tries to put in his pocket. Amos says, "I'm beginning to think you're not all there with your convictions and your hop--! I wish I knew how it was going to turn out with you. You'll ruin yourself in the end." But Joseph scorns Amos's concern for the future: "There is no personal future any more.... I wouldn't stake a pin on my future." 


Amos leaves him alone in the bedroom, and Joseph searches for something that he can use to pin down the hundred-dollar bill that Amos has left behind. After going through some dresser drawers he finds a pincushion and leaves the bill attached to the cover over a pillow. Then he goes upstairs to the music room, where he puts on a recording of "a Haydn divertimento for the cello, played by Piatigorsky." He had given it to Etta in one of his attempts to "improve" her. 




"It was the first movement, the adagio, that I cared most about. Its sober opening notes, preliminaries to a thoughtful confession, showed me that I was still an apprentice in suffering and humiliation." 

What I should do with them, how to meet them, was answered in the second declaration: with grace, without meanness. And though I could not as yet apply that answer to myself, I recognized its rightness and was vehemently moved by it. Not until I was a whole man could it be my answer, too. And was I to become this whole man alone, without aid? I was too weak for it, I did not command the will. Then in what quarter should I look for help, where was the power? ... The music named only one source, the universal one, God. But what a miserable surrender that would be, born out of disheartenment and chaos; and out of fear, bodily and imperious, that like a disease asked for a remedy and did not care how it was supplied.

It's a moment that, in this earliest of Bellow novels, will be repeated throughout the body of his work: the solitary intellectual, brought to a moment of spiritual crisis -- and then brought down from the lofty heights of introspection by the rude intrusion of ordinary life. For at this moment, as Joseph is wandering through "the seldom-disturbed thickets around the heart," Etta pops up and wants to play her Xavier Cugat records. 


They argue, childishly. Especially childishly on Joseph's part, since he's almost twice her age. And then, shockingly, Joseph decides that what she needs is a spanking. Shockingly, because the psychosexual import of what he's about to do is an entirely new note in the novel, prepared for only by the quotation from Isaiah that had been part of Joseph's thinking earlier. 

With the fingers of her free hand she tired to reach my face. Seizing her by the hair fiercely, I snapped her head back; her outcry never left her throat; her nails missed me narrowly. Her eyes shut tightly, in horror. "Here's something from a beggar you won't forget in a hurry," I muttered. I dragged her to the piano bench, still gripping her hair.... I pulled her over my knee, trapping both her legs in mine. 

This near-rape is the product of an argument over who gets to use the phonograph. That alone opens an new window into Joseph's character, into the dark frustrations of the dangling man. Adding to the perverseness of the scene is Joseph's own acknowledgment earlier that Etta looks like him. There is an element of self-rape in the scene. 


Her cries attract Amos, Dolly, and Iva. Accusations fly, and in the course of them Etta reveals that she has been spying on her uncle: "You were looking in Mama's dressing table." For his part, Joseph has the bad grace to take out his anger (and nascent guilt) on his wife: "In the darkened corner near the phonograph Iva lowered her head into her hands. 'Hey! what are you acting up for back there?' I called out to her." And when they get home and she sits on the bed and bursts into tears, he shouts at her, "It's so nice to know that you at least have faith in me!"