Authors: Saul Bellow
What could be more boring than the long dinners Stalin gave, as Djilas describes them? Even I, a person seasoned in boredom by my years in Chicago, marinated,
mithridated
by the USA, was horrified by Djilas’s account of those twelve-course all-night banquets. The guests drank and ate, and ate and drank, and then at 2 a.m. they had to sit down to watch an American Western. Their bottoms ached. There was dread in their hearts. Stalin, as he chatted and joked, was mentally picking those who were going to get it in the neck and while they chewed and snorted and guzzled they knew this, they expected shortly to be shot.
What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s
Table Talk
. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with
Schlag
while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!
Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a
personal
connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our world-view has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the création as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world
cannot
be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever—by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.”
These were some of the notes that Thaxter wanted me to expand. I was however in too unstable a condition. Several times a week I went downtown to see my lawyers and discuss my problems. They told me how complex my predicament was. Their news was worse and worse. I soared in elevators looking for salvation in female form whenever a door opened. A person in my condition should lock himself in his room, and if he hasn’t the strength of character to take Pascal’s advice to stay put he ought to throw the key out of the window. Then the door rolled open in the county building and I saw Renata Koffritz. She too wore a numbered steel badge. We were both taxpayers, voters, citizens. But oh, what citizens! And where was the voice that said, “My Fate!”? It was silent. Was she, then, it? She certainly was all woman, soft and beautifully heavy in a miniskirt and nursery-school shoes fastened with a single strap. I thought, God help me. I thought, Better think twice about this. I even thought, At your age a Buddhist would already be thinking of disappearing forever into the forest. But it was no use. She may not have been the Fate I was looking for but she was nevertheless a Fate. She even knew my name. “You must be Mr. Citrine,” she said.
The year before I had been given an award by the Zig-Zag Club, a Chicago cultural society of bank executives and stockbrokers. I was not invited to become a member. I did however receive a plaque for the book I wrote about Harry Hopkins and my picture was in the
Daily News
. Perhaps the lady had seen it there. But she said, “Your friend Mr. Szathmar is my divorce lawyer and he thought we should get to know each other.”
Ah, she had me. How quickly she informed me that she was being divorced. Those love-pious eyes were already sending messages of love and depravity to the Chicago-boy sector of my soul. A gust of the old West Side sex malaria came over me.
“Mr. Szathmar is devoted to you. He adores you. He practically closes his eyes and looks poetic when he discusses you. And he’s such a stout man, you don’t expect it. He told me about your love who crashed in the jungle. And also about your first romance—with the doctor’s daughter.”
“Naomi Lutz.”
“That’s a crazy name.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it.”
It was true that my boyhood friend Szathmar loved me but he loved matchmaking or procuring also. He had a passion for arranging affairs. This was useful to him professionally, as it tied many clients to him. In special cases he took over all the practical details for them—the rent of a mistress’s apartment, her car, and her charge accounts, her dental bills. He even covered suicide attempts. Even funerals. Not the law but fixing people up was his real calling. And we two boyhood pals were going to continue lustful to the end, if he had his way. He made this decorous. He did it all with philosophy, poetry, ideology. He quoted, he played records, and he theorized about women. He tried to keep up with the rapidly changing erotic slang of successive generations. So were we to end our lives as cunt-struck doddering wooers left over from a Goldoni farce? Or like Balzac’s Baron Hulot d’Ervy whose wife on her deathbed hears the old man propositioning the maid?
Alec Szathmar a few years ago, while under great stress in the vaults of the First National Bank, suffered a heart attack. I loved foolish Szathmar. I worried terribly about him. As soon as he was out of the intensive care unit, I ran down to see him and found that he was already being sexual. After heart attacks this is common, apparently. Under the powerful crown of white hair, bushy on the cheekbones in the new style of adornment, his gloomy eyes dilated as soon as a nurse entered his room though he still looked purple in the face. My old friend who now was stout, massive, was restless in bed. He threw himself about, kicked away the sheets, and exposed himself as if by fretful accident. If I was making a sympathy call he didn’t need my goddamn sympathy. Those eyes of his were grim and alert. At last I said, “Now Alec stop this flashing. You know what I’m talking about—stop uncovering your parts every time some poor old lady comes to mop under the bed.”
He glared. “What? You’re stupid!” he said.
“That’s all right. Quit pulling up your gown.”
Bad examples can be elevating—you can win a quick promotion in taste and say, “Poor old Alec, flashing. By the grace of God, there never goes me.” Yet here I was in the jury box with an erection for Renata. I was excited, amused, I was slightly mortified. Before us was a personal-injury case. In fairness I should have gone to the judge and asked to be disqualified. “Your honor, I can’t keep my mind on the trial because of the glorious lady juror next to me. I’m sorry to be such an adolescent. . . .” (Sorry! I was in seventh heaven.) Besides, the case was only one of those phony whiplash suits against the insurance company filed by ‘the lady passenger in a taxi collision. My personal business was more important. The trial was only background music. I kept the time with metronomic pulsations.
Two floors below, I myself was defendant in a post-decree action to deprive me of all my money. You might have thought that this would sober me. Not in the least!
Excused for lunch I hurried to La Salle Street to get information from Alec Szathmar about this wonderful girl. As I ran into the Chicago crowd I felt my pegs slipping, the strings slacker, my tone going lower. But what was I to do singlehanded about a force that had seized the whole world?
There was a genteel and almost Harvard air about Alec’s office, though he was a night-school lawyer. The layout was princely, sets of torts and statutes, an atmosphere of high jurisprudence, photographs of Justice Holmes and Learned Hand. Before the Depression Alec had been a rich kid. Not big-rich, only neighborhood-rich. But I knew rich kids. I had studied rich kids at the very top of society—as in the case of Bobby Kennedy. Von Humboldt Fleisher who always claimed that he had been one was not a real rich boy while Alec Szathmar who had been a rich boy told everyone that he was really a poet. In college he proved this by possession. He owned the works of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. He memorized “Prufrock,” which became one of his assets. But the Depression hit the Szathmars hard and he didn’t get the silk-stocking education his doting scheming old father hoped to give him. However, just as Alec in boyhood had had bikes and chemistry sets and BB guns and fencing foils and tennis rackets and boxing gloves and skates and ukuleles, he now owned all the latest IBM equipment, conference phones, desk computers, transistor wristwatches, Xerox machines, tape recorders, and hundreds of thick law books.
He had gained weight after his coronary, when he should have thinned down. Always a conservative dresser he tried to cover his broad can with double-vented jackets. So he looked like a giant thrush. The exceedingly human face of this bird was framed with stormy white sideburns. The warm brown eyes full of love and friendship were not especially honest. One of C. G. Jung’s observations helped me to make sense of Szathmar. Some minds, said Jung, belong to earlier periods of history. Among our contemporaries there are Babylonians and Carthaginians or types from the Middle Ages. To me Szathmar was an eighteenth-century cavalryman, a follower of Pandour von Trenck, the cousin of my lucky Trenck. His padded swarthy cheeks, his Roman nose, his mutton-chop whiskers, his fat chest wide hips neat feet and virile cleft chin attracted women. Whom women will embrace is one of the unfathomable mysteries. But of course the race has to keep going. Anyway, here was Szathmar waiting to receive me. In his chair his posture suggested clumsy but unshakable sexual horsemanship atop pretty ladies. His arms were crossed, like the arms of Rodin’s
Balzac
. Unfortunately he still looked a bit ill. Almost everyone downtown seemed to me a touch sick these days.
“Alec, who is this Renata Koffritz? Brief me.” Szathmar took a warm interest in his clients, especially the attractive women. They got sympathy from him, psychiatric guidance practical advice and even touches of art and philosophy. And he briefed me: only child; kooky mother; no father in sight; ran away to Mexico with her high-school art teacher; fetched back; ran away later to Berkeley; found in one of those California touch-therapy groups; married off to Koffritz, a salesman whose line was crypts and tombs—
“Hold it. Have you seen him? A tall fellow? Brown beard? Why, he’s the man who gave old Myron Swiebel a sales pitch in the Russian Bath on Division Streetl”