3. Dangling Man, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 89-140

January 28 through April 9

_____

The visit to Joseph's father goes well, and he even accepts -- after Iva's urging -- the cash they're given as an anniversary present. But he remains conscious that his father disapproves of his majoring in the humanities: "A nonprofessional education is something the middle classes can ill afford" is his characterization of his father's attitude. "I have prepared myself for the kind of life I shall never be able to lead." 


He discovers, among the bottles Vanaker has tossed from the window, a pair of socks that he identifies as his own. This makes him believe that Vanaker is stealing from them, and that he may indeed have taken Iva's perfume. 


He runs into an old friend, Alf Steidler, who has been rejected by the draft: "Bad teeth, bad heart, and emotionally unstable." Steidler has been an actor and director supported by the WPA, but with the end of that subsidy is knocking about. He went to Hollywood with some ideas that he tried to pitch to Ernst Lubitsch, but never got to see him. "At twenty-eight, he was old-fashioned. He had all the ways of a theatrical generation that was already at the point of death when, in his high-school days, he had cut classes to admire its aging comedians in the mangy splendor of the Oriental." 

Oriental Theater (image by John Chuckman) 

They spend the day talking, which leaves Joseph "as tired as though I had spent the day in dissipations of a particularly degrading sort with Steidler as my accomplice. I did not tell Iva of the visit. She disapproves of him."


Returning to his solitary life after the encounter with Steidler, Joseph begins carrying on dialogues with "the Spirit of Alternatives," also known as "But on the Other Hand" or "Tu As Raison Aussi." He tells this alter ego "That human nature is too small to pit against the unsolvables. Or nature, mind's nature, is weak, and only the heart can be relied on.... Reason has to conquer itself. Then what are we given reason for? To conquer the blessedness of unreason?" You can't "banish the world," because it has become so much a part of you: 

"It presents you with a gun or a mechanic's tool, it singles you out for this part or that, brings you ringing news of disasters and victories, shunts you back and forth, abridges your rights, cuts off your future, is clumsy or crafty, oppressive, treacherous, murderous, black, whorish, venal, inadvertently naive or funny. Whatever you do, you cannot dismiss it."

He tries to deny to himself that he's alienated, but recognizes that he quarrels with people, and asks himself, "Is it because they force you to recognize that you belong to their world?" He reflects on his disaffection with communism: "I regarded politics as an inferior activity. Plato tells us that if everything were as it should be, the best men would avoid office, not vie for it." 


And he struggles with finding an ultimate motive, an "ideal construction" to provide a meaning for his existence. "I could name hundreds of these ideal constructions, each with its assertions and symbols, each finding -- in conduct, in God, in art, in money -- its particular answer and each proclaiming: 'This is the only possible way to meet chaos.'" But he recognizes the end, "the obsession exhausts the man. It can become his enemy. It often does." So finally he ends this dialogue with himself in frustration. 


The landlady suffers a stroke and is not expected to live much longer, so the house tries to maintain quiet. But Vanaker is as noisy as ever, provoking Joseph to his own noisy protests against him, especially when he goes to the bathroom and leaves the door open. "I have several times made general but loud and menacing remarks about decency and politeness. But he is either too drunk or too witless to change. When I do these things, I make myself ill." He also disturbs Iva with his obsession with Vanaker. 


This is not the first time, it turns out, that Joseph has had trouble with living arrangements. Before they moved to the rooming house they had rented a flat from the Gesells. Beth Gesell was an amateur sculptor who made the house shake with her work. Her husband was an electrician. But during the winter the house became extremely cold. After Joseph complained to Gesell, the house warmed up slightly, but finally Iva decided to withhold the rent until the problem was resolved. "There were hard feelings. But in February things took a turn for the better.... The rent was paid, the heat rose, the hot water returned." 


This state of affairs didn't last long, however. One Sunday "the house began to go cold, and at two o'clock the electricity was shut off." Joseph found Gesell in the basement working on something, with a piece of pipe in his hand. He angrily asked why the electricity was off without some prior notice, and Gesell said, "I don't have to get your permission." When Joseph asked how much longer, Gesell ignored him. "I took him by the shoulder and, forcing him round, pushed aside the pipe and struck him.... I carried him to the wall, hitting repeatedly into his chest and belly and cutting my knuckles on his open, panting mouth. After the first few blows, my anger vanished. In weariness and self-disgust I pinned him against the bricks." 


Although Gesell threatened to take out a warrant against Joseph, he failed to follow through. "Iva guessed that Beth was unwilling to invest in a warrant. We moved a month later. Iva and Beth made all the arrangements." 

This was "not like" me; it was an early symptom. The old Joseph was inclined to be even-tempered.... But we are a people of tantrums, nevertheless; a word exchanged in a movie or in some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another. Only, in my opinion, our rages are deceptive; we are too ignorant and spiritually poor to know that we fall on the "enemy" from confused motives of love and loneliness. Perhaps, also, self-contempt. But for the most part, loneliness.

Joseph begins to think of himself as "a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn." He also reflects on the limitations he faces. "Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death." So the dangling life, the life with an uncertain future, takes its toll. "The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery." 


Steidler continues to visit, and Joseph continues to feel "at the end of a few hours, that we are practicing some terrible vice together. We smoke and talk." Except for Steidler, Joseph has rejected company, and he dislikes this distraction from his solitary self-absorption: "I would rather not be entertained. I welcomed him at first, and I still rather like him. But I wish he would not come so often." Myron Adler returns to add another potential distraction for Joseph, but days go by with no visits from either Adler or Steidler, and Joseph begins to realize the burden of his solitude: "If I were a little less obstinate, I would confess failure and say that I do not know what to do with my freedom." 


On the other hand, he observes, he and Iva "have grown closer," a companionship born of their shared plight, "the cheap restaurant food we eat, our lack of money." But he still reflects on his feeling of superiority to the woman he married: "she is as far from ever from what I once desired to make her.... But now I am struck by the arrogance with which I set people apart into two groups: those with worth-while ideas and those without them." He does share with idea his discovery of Vanaker's sock-stealing. When he finds another pair on the bush where he found the first, he points them out to her. "She says we should find a way of showing that we are aware of the theft." 


John Pearl writes to him, complaining about New York's "unnatural, too-human deadness." Joseph recognizes "the danger he sees of the lack of the human in the too-human" urban environment. "We find it, as others before us have found it in the last two hundred years, and we bolt for 'Nature.'" He is grateful for the letter and for "someone else's recognition of the difficult, the sorrowful, in what to others is merely neutral, the environment." He also begins to be more conscious of his self-imprisonment.

We struggle perpetually to free ourselves.... We do not know how. So, at times, we throw ourselves away. When what we really want to stop being so exclusively and vainly for our own sake, impure and unknowing, turning inward and self-fastened. The quest, I am beginning to think, whether it be for money, for notoriety, reputation, increase of pride, whether it leads us to thievery, slaughter, sacrifice, the quest is one and the same. All the striving is for one end. I do not entirely understand this impulse. But it seems to me that its final end is the desire for pure freedom.

Myron Adler finally visits him and is surprised to find that he lives in the one room, and moreover that he has been there for almost nine months. Joseph recognizes Adler's shock at the situation he finds him in. Adler also tells him, "You've changed a lot. Everybody says so.... You're becoming bad-tempered." Joseph replies, "Good!" and Adler begins to get angry at Joseph's manner. Joseph apologizes in his way: "I see people so seldom, I've forgotten how to act." But he continues to push Adler away: "We are in different classes. The very difference in our clothes shows it." Adler says, "You used to be an absolutely reasonable guy.... Now you sound so wild." Joseph reflects, "He was hale and businesslike, wanting no further trouble with me." 


When Joseph mentions Jeff Forman, the downed flier, Adler observes that Forman received a posthumous medal, but is offended when Joseph says, "C'est la vie," and refuses to be sentimental about their friend's death: "We can't do anything for Jeff, anyway, by pulling a long face." The visit ends uncomfortably, with Adler offering to lend him money. 


Apparently Joseph's brother Amos has decided to forgive and forget: "Dolly phoned to ask us to dinner next Sunday. I said we had already accepted another invitation." And the Farsons, who had left their baby to attend a training program, are moving to California, but leaving the baby this time with his parents "in Dakota." On the street, Joseph has an encounter with a rather strange and sickly woman who peddles Christian Science pamphlets. And Kitty sends him a note asking why he hasn't come to see her lately. "I tore it up before Iva could see it." 


Joseph, retreating from all of these encounters with the outside world, has another conversation with his "Spirit of Alternatives" in which he tries to deal with the pangs of conscience that his attempt at self-exile has caused. His alter ego tells him, "Everybody else is dangling, too. When and if you survive you can start setting yourself straight." And then he reveals an option that we weren't aware existed: "Look, there are moments when I feel it would be wisest to go to my draft board and ask to have my number called at once." 


So has this waiting to be called up been unnecessary all this time? It would seem so, or more properly, that Joseph has chosen to prolong his dangling state as a means of self-discovery. 

I am somewhat afraid of the vanity of thinking that I can make my own way toward clarity. But it is even more important to know whether I can claim the right to preserve myself in this flood of death that has carried off so many like me, muffling them and bearing them down and down, minds untried and sinews useless -- so much debris.

By avoiding, or at least postponing, the possible death sentence that fighting in the war involves, he has been putting himself to the test. "I recall Spinoza's having written that no virtue could be considered greater than that of trying to preserve oneself.... He didn't say one's life. He said oneself." He sees his decision to dangle as an act of freedom. 

We are afraid to govern ourselves. Of course. It is so hard. We soon want to give up our freedom. It is not even real freedom, because it is not accompanied by comprehension. It is only a preliminary condition of freedom. But we hate it. And soon we run out, we choose a master, roll over on our backs and ask for the leash.... It isn't love that gives us weariness of life. It's our inability to be free.

He has found his freedom tested by his own emotions: at being snubbed by his former Communist Party comrade, at the petulance of his niece Etta, at his wife's drinking too much at a party, at Kitty's evident lack of need for his company, at Gesell's turning off the electricity, at Vanaker's coughing and stealing and peeing with the door open. He argues, "The war can destroy me physically. That it can do. But so can bacteria. I must be concerned with them, naturally. I must take account of them. They can obliterate me. But as long as I am alive, I must follow my destiny in spite of them." 


To which his alter ego, Tu As Raison Aussi, comments: "Then only one question remains.... Whether you have a separate destiny." The realization that his freedom is bound up with other people is shattering: He turns pale, he begins to chill, he wraps himself up in a blanket. 


Spring is beginning to arrive, and when he goes to meet Iva the next day, "there are a few green stubs of iris showing, nearly provoking me into saying: 'Go back, you don't know what you're getting into.'" 


The days pass: a tenant moves out and a new one moves in; Steidler sends a postcard from New York saying he may move there; he helps Mrs. Bartlett move a cot into the landlady's room and the sight of her lying there on what will be her deathbed disturbs him -- "I went into the hall quickly." The early signs of spring speak to him of "an impossible hope, the hope of an impossible rejuvenation.... I even saw in a brick passageway an untimely butterfly, out of place both in the season and the heart of the city, and somehow alien to the whole condition of the century." He finds new lines in his face and "shrugged them off as inevitable, the price of experience, an outlay that had better be made ungrudgingly, since it was bound in any case to be collected." 


His depression is fed by pride: When Iva asks him to cash her paycheck, he refuses because he had once been grilled by a bank manager during an earlier attempt to cash a check. He resents it that "he addressed me by my first name, as though I were an immigrant or a young boy or a Negro." He had made a scene, and his memory of this makes it impossible for him to explain to Iva why he can't cash her check. Even if he had done so, he reasons, "should would have been just as angry. She would have been in the right, hence very severe." And when they argue about it, she suspects the truth: "Are you sure you didn't get into a fight of some kind over there?" He denies it. 


They quarrel, and he expresses his resentment that she has "become the breadwinner" and he has been reduced to an errand boy. "Every morning you leave half a dozen orders for me. And just a while ago you mentioned that I read the papers." Months of unspoken tension break forth, and she begins to cry, for which he berates her: "Jesus, Jesus! Can we never have a talk without a flood of tears?" 


And then Vanaker goes to the bathroom. It is the spark that ignites a conflagration in Joseph. He takes off his slippers and silently goes out into the hall to confront Vanaker on the threshold of the bathroom. 

"Took you in it at last, didn't I!" I exclaimed. "You damned old whisky head. By God, I've had more than I can stand. There's a dying woman downstairs, and you slam around here all boozed up, raising as much hell as you please."

Iva comes into the hall to try to calm him, but Joseph begins to rant, attracting more of the tenants, including Mrs. Bartlett and Captain Briggs. Joseph accuses Vanaker of stealing. The Captain tries to intervene, and Joseph turns on him, almost provoking a fight between them. Iva orders Joseph back to their room, and then goes to try to talk to the neighbors. 


Joseph puts on his shoes and his street clothes and storms out of the house into the night. "I could not even imagine what Iva's misery must be, nor the state of the house," he realizes as he begins to come to his senses.

I believe I had known for some time that the moment I had been waiting for had come, and that it was impossible to resist any longer. I must give myself up. 

So he goes to the draft board where he leaves a note: "I hereby request to be taken at the earliest possible moment into the armed services." 


Mrs. Briggs orders both Vanaker and Joseph to move. A few days later, the landlady dies, and on the day of the funeral Joseph receives his draft notice. "Universal relief." 


When Vanaker moves, Joseph hears the maid cleaning his room and goes in. "She had found two empty perfume bottles in his wastebasket." 


Iva decides to move in with her parents. 


Joseph goes to see his father and looks into his old bedroom. 

It was suddenly given me to experience one of those consummating glimpses that come to all of us periodically. The room, delusively, dwindled and became a tiny square, swiftly drawn back, myself and all the objects in it growing smaller. This was not a mere visual trick. I understood it to be a revelation of the ephemeral agreements by which we live and pace ourselves.... This place ... was not here thirty years ago. Birds flew through this space. It may be gone fifty years hence. Such reality, I thought, is actually very dangerous, very treacherous. It should not be trusted.

It triggers another revelation: 

I had not done well alone. I doubted whether anyone could. To be pushed upon oneself entirely put the very facts of simple existence in doubt. Perhaps the war could teach me, by violence, what I had been unable to learn during those months in the room. Perhaps I could sound creation through other means. Perhaps. But things were now out of my hands. The next move was the world's. I could not bring myself to regret it.... I am no longer to be held accountable for myself; I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom canceled. 

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

December 27 through January 26 

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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 

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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!"