15. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 893-927

Chapter XXII

Returning to his Chicago haunts, Augie begins working on getting a teaching certificate, and the school at which he does his practice teaching employs his old neighbor, Kayo Obermark. Augie also buys a used Buick, which won't start on cold mornings without a push. Kayo nags him about not being married and becoming a father. "I seemed to have critics everywhere," Augie reflects, and he tells Kayo "my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated." In fact, Augie's drift through life has been a series of manipulations: by Grandma, by Einhorn, by Simon, by the Renlings, by the Magnuses, and by Thea -- among others. He asserts that "Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that's the worst of being helpless."

Kayo invites Augie home to meet his wife, and while he's there Kayo's brother-in-law offers to buy the Buick. Augie sells it to him for one hundred eighty dollars, paid by check, but then the brother-in-law insists they play poker. Kayo and his brother-in-law's wife play too, but Augie is the only winner. He gives Kayo his money back on the way home, but the brother-in-law stops the check when the Buick stops running, and Augie has to come fetch it.

He resumes his affair with Sophie Geratis, who is married now. But Sophie's husband has turned out to be gay, and she wants to divorce him and marry Augie. Despite Kayo's advice, Augie isn't ready to get married and tells Sophie so. She says, "I'm all right for bed, but not to marry.... Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard." Augie tells her that all he knows about his father is that he drove a truck for a laundry. But he knows that Sophie "would have scolded me for my own good too much."

Another friend, Clem Tambow, has an idea: He and Augie will open a vocational counseling service. Clem is about to get his psychology degree, so he'll give aptitude tests and Augie can conduct interviews. Augie rejects the idea as too much of a scam. He tells Clem that he has had a revelation: "since I've been working for Robey I have reached the conclusion that I couldn't utilize even ten percent of what I already knew.... Anything that just adds information that you can't use is just plain dangerous." So he wants to simplify his life: He wants to buy a little land and settle on it. He'll "get married and set up a kind of home and teach school." He'll get his mother and his brother out of their respective institutions, and he'll get the students for his school from state institutions. He'll teach woodworking and maybe his brother George can teach shoe repair. "Maybe I'll study languages so I could teach them. My mother could sit on the porch and the animals would come around her, by her shoes, the roosters and the cats. Maybe we could start a tree nursery."

Clem scoffs at Augie's little utopia, starting with the students: "You think you'll love them so they'll turn into little Michelangelos and Tolstois, and you'll give them their chance in life and rescue them, so you'll be their saint and holy father. But if you make them so good, how will they get along in the world?" Augie wants to be a king, he says, "You sonofabitch, you want to be the kind goddam king over these women and children and your half-wit brother. Your father ditched the family, and you did your share of ditching too, so now you want to make up for it."

Augie persists in this daydream, however, and even thinks about marrying Sophie. But then Pearl Harbor is attacked, and suddenly his attention shifts elsewhere: "At first I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn't wait to go and fight. I was a madman in the movies and yelled and clapped in the newsreel." But when he goes to volunteer he discovers that he has developed a hernia from the fall with Bizcocho. So he goes into County Hospital to have the operation done.

Sophie visits him every day in the hospital, though she thinks he's crazy for having the operation when it could get him out of the draft. Her husband has been drafted, which she sees as another reason for Augie to stick around. "Simon came to see me and threw a bag of oranges on the bed. He bawled me out that I hadn't gone to a private hospital." Padilla has let his girlfriend use Augie's room while he was in the hospital, so he's essentially living there, too. So he lets Augie move into his own place. "It took me many long months to get better, and I was doing very poorly. And about this time I got a letter from Thea, APO San Francisco, telling me that she had married an Air Force captain."

Augie goes to visit his mother, and they go for a walk. On their way back, Simon drives up with a blond woman in the car. He signals to Augie not to let their mother know about the woman. Simon "was making real dough now. A company he had invested in was manufacturing a gimmick for the Army." After taking their mother home, Simon introduces Augie to his mistress, Renée. "It was a hard thing for me to get through my head, after I came to know her, that she could be so important to him," Augie recalls. She seems immature and somehow suspicious and uncertain to him. Though Simon proclaims his love for Renée, "He was romantic about Charlotte too. And Renée had to bear it and know she could never have any exclusive claim on him." Augie reflects, however, that he had treated Stella pretty much the same way when Thea turned up in his life. Renée gets her own by demanding from Simon everything that Charlotte has. They fight about it: "Charlotte has her own money, don't you realize that?" Renée replies, "But not what you want. I've got that."

While waiting to recover from the hernia operation, Augie takes a job as a salesman with a business machine company -- a plum job made available by the wartime manpower shortage. But he remains eager to get into the service, to Simon's disgust -- Simon has been declared 4F because of an ear problem. The Army and Navy continue to reject Augie, so he joins the Merchant Marine. While he's waiting to go to Sheepshead Bay for training, Augie runs into Simon, who tells him that Renée tried to commit suicide -- though he admits that she may have been faking it. Charlotte had found out about Renée and told Simon that it had to stop. After a meeting in which Renée cursed Charlotte and both Charlotte and Simon slapped Renée, Simon paid Renée off and sent her to California. But she had come back and telephoned Simon with the news that she was pregnant. Simon told her he didn't care and called her a crook. "After a silence she hung up. This was when he thought she would kill herself." So he went to check on her and found her unconscious. She is in her fourth month of pregnancy, and he asks Augie what to do.

"What's there to do? Nothing. There'll be a kid now. Who knows but that this is the way you and George and I happened to come into the world."

Chapter XXIII

Augie applies to the Purser's and Pharmacist's Mate School, but has to do training on Chesapeake Bay first. In Baltimore there are letters from friends, including Sophie, who has joined her husband at Camp Blanding. "She said farewell but kept saying it in different letters." They return to Sheepshead, where he studies bookkeeping and "ship's doctoring." Stella Chesney, whom he helped get out of Mexico, is in New York. He learns that Oliver had promised to make her a star in Hollywood, and that they had wound up in Mexico on a kind of side trip. On a weekend leave, Augie and Stella resume their affair, and he falls in love with her.

Was she a vain person, or injurious or cynical, it couldn't make any difference now. Or was I a foolish, uncorrected, blundering, provisional, unreliable man, this was taken away as of no account and couldn't have any sense or meaning. 

He has to return to the base on Monday morning, and he is on his best behavior for fear that his next weekend leave will be canceled. He hurries back to her the next Saturday and finds her sick in bed, partly because she was worried if he really loved her. He proposes to her, and they decide to get married once his training at Sheepshead is over.

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."