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."

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

Chapter XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so they set out on their journey.

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

Chapter XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 613-654

Chapter XI

Augie pays his rent for his room in a student house on the South Side by answering the common telephone and distributing the mail, chores that the owner, Owens, considers beneath him. He gets regular visits from Clem Tambow, who, like others of his old friends, regards him as a slacker, "postponing everything." Augie admits that he "had some restlessness to be taken up into something greater than myself," but the path in that direction hasn't presented itself yet.

Clem's real reason for visiting Augie so often is that he is trying to hook up with Mimi Villars, a waitress who lives in the house. She is originally from Los Angeles, where her father had been a movie actor in silent films, and had come to Chicago "to study, but she was expelled from the university for going past the bounds of necking at Greene Hall, in the lounge." She has a boyfriend, Hooker Frazer, a graduate student in political science who is one of Augie's regular customers. Augie sometimes steals two copies of the books Frazer wants so he can talk with him about them.

Frazer is not yet divorced from his first wife, so he and Mimi can't marry, even if she wanted to. She opens up to Augie on all aspects of her life

I could see what a value she set on the intelligence of men. If they didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet-store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or bulbs of snarling flowers. She had a high, absolute standard, and she preferred people to miss it from suffering, vice, being criminal or perverted, or of loony impulse. 

Like Augie, she is a thief, stealing her clothes from department stores. "The thing I began to learn from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it." Clem Tambow becomes suspicious that Augie and Mimi are lovers, but they aren't. Augie is surprised to find that she used to be the sister-in-law of Sylvester, the man for whom Augie once passed out handbills: He had been married to Mimi's sister.

Meanwhile, Simon has gotten married, though from Augie's point of view the consequences are decidedly mixed. "In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality." And in the case of Simon's marriage, there is a mixture of appearance and reality, for though he and Charlotte Magnus are in fact married, they have been forced by her parents to maintain the fiction that they are only engaged. Simon pays rent at a bachelor's club while in fact living with the Magnuses in their West Side flat.

He is better dressed now, and he drives a new gray Pontiac. He is learning the coal business at one of the yards owned by the Magnuses. The family has a tradition of arranging marriages for their daughters, believing they can control things better that way. Simon explains, "They'd rather have a poor young man. A poor young man gets up more steam and pressure. They were like that themselves, and they know." Simon's arrival to wealth is so new that "his shirt smelled of the store; it hadn't been to the laundry yet."

Augie goes with him to the "hot interior of lamps and rugs" that is the Magnuses' flat. "Everything was ungainly there, roomy and oversized." The Magnuses, too, are oversized, including Charlotte. When Augie is left alone with Simon and Charlotte, Simon jokes, "'Nobody's ever been laid better at any price.' It was so ambiguous and inside-out that it had to be taken as amusing, and she hurried and come down from a romantic, sentimental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love."

Underneath everything, however, "it came through to me that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into." With the family Simon "was boisterous, capricious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining room of stable and upright wealth." He tells Augie they were unlucky "not to have this kind of close and loyal family." Augie doesn't take this well: "I had a fit of hate for the fat person he was becoming." But he has to admit that he "was a sucker for it too, family love." He senses that he is very much the outsider in this gathering. "Well, they owned stores; maybe they smelled a thief in me." And he becomes even more the outsider when he reveals that he doesn't play pinochle, and is forced into a corner with the children who teach him the game.

Uncle Charlie Magnus is the owner of the coal yards. "He was white, thick, and peevish, and had the kind of insolence that sometimes affects the eyes like snowblindness, making you think there's something arctic about having a million bucks."

Nobody thought to remonstrate about children and young girls when Uncle Charlie said, "Sonofabitch, you're fo-kay, my boy, fo-kay. You got the goods. I think you can put it down between the sheets too, eh?" because this was just his usual manner of speaking.

Through Simon's influence, Augie becomes another potential husband for the Magnus daughters, "for there wasn't any lack of daughters to marry, some of them pretty and all with money." He finds Lucy Magnus, "slighter than most of her family," somewhat attractive, but "I had no special mind to get married. I saw Simon's difficulties too clearly for that." One strike against Augie, however, is his lack of a definable occupation. Simon has put it out that Augie is in the "book business" and that he's planning to go back to college. This doesn't go over particularly well with Charlotte's father.

"Goddammit the schools. There's schoolboys now until gray hair. So what are you studying for, a lawyer? Fo-kay! I guess we got to have them, the crooks. My sons don't go to school. My daughters go, so long as it keeps them out of trouble." 

Among the Magnus cousins Augie recognizes an old schoolfellow, Kelly Weintraub, who knows about the March family, including Simon and Augie's brother, George. But Simon is way ahead of him: He has told Charlotte about George, and he knows enough about Kelly to counter anything he might have to tell the Magnuses about himself.

Augie soon learns that Simon has plans to integrate him into the Magnus circles, taking him to "lunch with uncles and cousins in the rich businessmen's restaurants and clubs, fancy steakhouses." Simon also has plans, a sort of mental file, to settle old scores with people: "Did Cissy and Five Properties have a folder in it to themselves? I thought they must." Before he goes out with Simon, Augie has to undergo a kind of military inspection of his clothes and his person, and he goes with him to barbershops to have everything taken care of to Simon's specifications. "I had larger cleaning and laundry bills than ever before," which bothers Augie because he's saving for the university fees.

But the other side of Simon also shows itself: "he slept badly and was looking flabby and ill, and one morning when he came to fetch me he locked himself in the toilet and cried." He begins to refuse to come inside Augie's rooming house, which he detests. First he would honk his horn outside when he picked Augie up, then he began telephoning or even sending wires when he wanted him. He drives recklessly, and it becomes evident to Augie "that his feelings were suicidal from the way he drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments." He curses at other drivers and at pedestrians and keeps a tire tool under his seat as a weapon for traffic arguments.

In the spring he leases a coal yard. It is the end of the coal season, and he spends the summer making the repairs it needs. "By Simon's wish I had to spend afternoons with him studying the business. Especially since I had heard him weeping in the can Simon wasn't easy for me to turn down." Augie sometimes serves as lunch relief for the yard manager and weighmaster, Happy Kellerman. But Augie also notices the self-doubt preying on Simon: "The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror." But he retains his determination to succeed:

Simon was wised up as to how to do things politically -- to be in a position to bid on municipal business -- and he saw wardheelers and was kissing cousins with the police; he took up with lieutenants and captains, with lawyers, with real-estate men, with gamblers and bookies, the important ones who owned legitimate businesses on the side and had property.... I had to wait for his calls in the police station to tell the cops when a load was setting out from the yard, my first lawful sitting in such a place, moving from dark to lighter inside the great social protoplasm. 

Simon is on special terms with Lieutenant Nuzzo, "an Italian [who] brought the style of ancient kingdoms with him."

Sometimes Simon and Augie go swimming in the lake, and Augie notices the way Simon dives, worrying that "he threw himself in with a thought of never coming to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down." Augie makes a habit of not going in the water when his brother does, just in case he is needed to pull him out of the water. Simon also casts a lascivious eye at the women at the lake. "The girls were not always frightened of him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome, and I don't know what floors his bare feet left in shade-drawn hot rooms. Only a year ago he would not have given a second glance at such bims." But in Charlotte he has a mate whose "first aim and the reason for her striving was to make the union serious by constructing a fortune on it." For Augie her attitude recalls Lady Macbeth's "'Unsex me here!' A call so hard, to what is so hard, that it makes the soul neuter."

Sometimes when he is out with Simon they visit their mother. But one time Simon finds her affixing pins to Roosevelt campaign buttons, for which she is being paid ten cents a hundred and earning a few dollars a week. He goes into a rage: "I'll have you know that my mother isn't going to do any piecework for ten, twenty, thirty cents, or a dollar an hour. She gets all the money she needs from me." Even when his mother pleads that she asked to do the work, he won't give in. He also gets angry when he finds that a coat Charlotte has given her is missing from the closet, and when the director's wife explains that it was sent to the cleaners because his mother spilled coffee on it, and offers to alter its fit when it comes back, Simon protests, "She can afford a good tailor if she needs alterations."