The Actual
Saul Bellow
THE ACTUAL
Contents
The Actual
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) is the only novelist to receive three National book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr Sammler’s Planet. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him in 1976 ‘for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.’ In 1990, Mr Bellow was presented with the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. He has also received the National Medal of Arts. His books include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (l947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby’s Memoirs (1969), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), To Jerusalem and Back (1976), The Dean’s December (1982), Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Something to Remember Me By (1991), It All Adds Up (1994), The Actual (1997), Ravelstein (2000) and Collected Stories (2001).
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
The Actual
‘Like all super-fiction, Bellow’s novella is elliptical while seeming utterly direct … he has a gift for concentrating life into a quick, nervy sentence … Genius, to be swallowed whole’
David Hughes, Mail on Sunday
‘This is a slender volume … but, in what amounts to a literary miracle, Bellow manages to hint at the histories of about half-a-dozen characters, and leave an impression of lives lived slowly. Does Bellow get older, or just better?’
Time Out
‘Bellow is still too good, too sharply observed for most writers to even dream of matching … His prose is still tough and muscular, as streetwise as it is lyric’
Irish Times
‘Stands as a mature distillation of Bellow’s work to date: a twinkling … gem that recapitulates in miniature the issues and ideas that have animated his fiction of the last 50 years … Elegiac … touching’
International Herald Tribune
‘No American writer is capable of waxing so cantankerous, and yet his voice has the meticulous range and certainty of a cathedral choir … The wit is exquisitely mannered; the intelligence both fearless and elegant’
Boston Globe
‘The Actual miniaturizes Bellow’s deepest concerns … we are the witnesses of a life devoted to the careful prolongation of the novel form. We should be grateful’
Guardian
It’s easy enough to see what people think they’re doing. Nor is what they really are up to hard for common sense to make out. The usual repertories of stratagems, deceits, personality rackets, ringing the changes on criminal cunning, are hardly worth examining. Years have gone by since I last found interest in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and its once fresh story-behind-the-story. That a slip of the tongue will lead you back to the mischievous id needs no more proving. I grant that Freud was one of the most ingenious men who ever lived, but I have no more use for his system than I have for Paley’s watch – a metaphor for the universe, wound up in the beginning, then ticking away for billions of years. As long as a single thing is there to suppose, somebody (in this case an eighteenth-century English clergyman) will be sure to suppose it.
To become known was never a special desire with me. And I do not feel that I would be hard for a good observer to make out. When asked, I say that I live in Chicago and am semiretired, but I never care to specify my trade. Not that there is much to hide. But something about me hints that there is. I have a Chinese look. After the Korean War, I was sent to study Chinese in a special school. Maybe my esoteric skills, by a process of secret suggestion, brought an East Asian expression into my face. The kids at school never called me ‘Chink’ – and they might have done it because I was in an ambiguous category, an outsider, an orphan. But that, too, was misleading. Both my parents were alive. I was put in an orphanage because my mother had a disease of the joints that sent her from sanitarium to sanitarium, mainly abroad. My father was a simple carpenter. The bills were paid by my mother’s family, her brothers being successful sausage manufacturers and able to afford the cures she took at Bad Nauheim or Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I was assumed at school to be one of the children from the orphanage. I had no occasion to explain my special circumstances, and all the peculiarities of those circumstances sank into the structure of my face – a round head, hair worn as long as the orphanage allowed, a pair of fat black eyes, a wide mouth with a sizable lip. Wonderful materials for the insidious Fu Manchu look.
A man’s road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to – exile. I didn’t allow myself to make too much of the Chinese lip. I seem to have decided that to be busy about one’s self-image, to adjust, revise, to tamper with it, was a waste of time.
In the days when I was reviewing my options, I believed that I might – just might – effect a transfer to another civilization. The Chinese would never notice me in China, while in my own country, looking vaguely Chinese would not be enough to prevent discovery … I probably mean exposure.
But I lasted only five years in the Far East; the last two of these I spent in Burma, where I made important business connections, discovering while immersed in another civilization that I had something of a gift for putting together business deals. Provided with a lifetime income through the Burmese operation, which had a Guatemalan branch, I returned to Chicago, where my emotional roots were.
I gave up being a Chinaman. Some Westerners of course preferred to be Oriental. There was the famous British hermit of Peking described so beautifully by Trevor-Roper; there was also Two-Gun Cohen, the Montreal gangster hired by Sun Yat-sen to be his bodyguard, and who never wished to return to Canada, it seems.
You will see soon enough that I had substantial reasons for resettling in Chicago. I might have gone elsewhere – to Baltimore or Boston – but the difference between cities is more of the same, superficially disguised. In Chicago I had unfinished emotional business. In Boston or in Baltimore I would still have thought, daily and regularly, of the same woman – of what I might have said to her, of what she might have answered. ‘Love objects,’ as psychiatry has named them, are not frequently come by or easily put aside. ‘Distance’ is really a formality. The mind takes no real notice of it.
I returned to Chicago and opened a business on Van Buren Street. I trained my employees to run it for me, and then I was free to fill my life with more interesting activities. Somewhat to my own surprise, I became part of a set of curious people. The main threat in a place like Chicago is emptiness – human gaps and breaks, a sort of spiritual ozone that smells like bleach. In the old days, Chicago streetcars gave off such a smell. Ozone is made by a combination of oxygen and ultraviolet rays in the upper atmosphere.
I found ways to protect myself from this liminal threat (the threat of being sucked into outer space). Oddly enough, I began to be invited out as a man who knew a lot about the Orient. At least, hostesses believed I did – I made no claim. One didn’t have to say much.
I settled into an apartment on the edge of Lincoln Park. And pretty soon I had a significant piece of luck. I met old Sigmund Adletsky and Mrs Adletsky at a dinner party. Adletsky is a name instantly recognized everywhere, like Prince Charles or Donald Trump – or, in earlier times, the Shah of Iran or Basil Zaharoff. Yes, Adletsky, the old Chief himself, the founding colossus, the man under whom the incomparable luxury hotel complex on the Caribbean coast of Mexico was built – one of many pleasure domes on the subtropical beaches of many continents. Old Adletsky had by now turned his empire over to his sons and grandchildren. He would never have bothered with the likes of me if he had still been running the hotels, the airlines, the mines, the electronics laboratories.
The dinner party at which we met was given by Frances Jellicoe. A Jellicoe commanded the British Grand Fleet in the Battle of Jutland (1916). The family had an American branch (so the American Jellicoes said), which was very rich. Frances, who came into a fortune, had also inherited a collection of paintings that included a Bosch, a Botticelli, and several Goya portraits, as well as some Picassos of my favorite kind – multiple noses and eyes. I greatly admired (esteemed) Frances. Fritz Rourke, her husband and the father of her two children, had divorced her, but she continued to love him, and not in the abstract. He was there that night, drunk and noisy, and the most conspicuous thing about the man was the quality or grade of the love to be seen in his ex-wife as she stood up for him. A stout woman, she had never been pretty. That night in her Gold Coast dining room, her face was aflame, and the lower lip was drawn away from the teeth. Rourke soon was drunk; he quickly got out of hand, breaking glasses. She took her stand behind the uncontrollable former husband’s chair, making a silent statement of despair, militancy, loyalty. Well, to me she was a rich human asset. Not the millions in her trust account, but her character – a character of great price.
Old Adletsky was sitting at my table, and he, too, was taking it all in. My guess is that few things of this nature occurred in the presence of a man so rich. For him, what happened during dinner may have been something like a return to earlier, immigrant days. To be a trillionaire is like living in a controlled environment, I imagine. He was a little guy, shrunken by his great age. Not very big to begin with. In the New World, his immigrant melting-pot generation of malnourished teeny-weenies produced six-foot sons and large, luxuriant daughters. I myself was both larger and heavier than my parents, though internally more fragile, perhaps.
I didn’t expect Adletsky to take note of my presence, and I was surprised a few days after the dinner party by a note from the old man’s secretary. I was requested to call his office for an appointment. At the bottom of the note were two words in Adletsky’s own hand: ‘Please do.’ Nearly a century ago, he had been taught to write in Cyrillic or, more probably, Hebrew characters, judging by the scrollwork of the capital P.
Thoroughly trained in the Adletsky system, the appointments secretary was unable to tell me, on the phone, why I was asked to come in. So I visited him in his glassy lair, his penthouse office suite. I went downtown and was conducted to an express elevator, activated by a special key. I felt about this swift ride as I used to feel about the pneumatic tubes that once connected department store salespersons to the cashiers. The sales slips and the dollar bills were sucked into the pipe, and – snick-snick – here are the new socks and there is your change.
You no longer face an executive across his desk. You sit with him on a divan. Beside you is a coffee table with a demitasse, a dish of sugar cubes.
I sensed that I was thickening my face defensively under Adletsky’s scrutiny. The old man had no need to ask personal questions. My life and deeds had been sifted by members of his staff. Evidently I had survived the preliminary screening. He had been so fully briefed that there would be no talk about my origins, education, accomplishments – thank God.
He said, ‘At Frances Jellicoe’s dinner, the name Jim Thorpe came up, and only you could identify the college that wonderful athlete came from …’
‘Carlisle,’ I said. ‘In Pennsylvania. An Indian school.’
‘You have no special interest in this; you just happened to know it. Do you have lots of general information in your head? Excuse me for asking, Mr Trellman, but when was the Federal Reserve Bank established?’
‘Back in 1913? … “Harry” is good enough.’
I could see that he was pleased, though in the penthouse dazzle I felt that all my ‘preparations’ were disintegrating. Preparations? Well, the title of Stanislavsky’s famous book is An Actor Prepares. Everybody prepares, and ascribes to others a power to judge, grants them the possession of standards that may be nonexistent.
I moved toward the shady side of the settee.
What Adletsky had gotten from me so far was random information of the sort useful in solving crossword puzzles. Of course, all this was preliminary. He behaved like a technician inspecting the model of an advanced device. What would a doctor have said about so small and old and wrinkled a creature as Adletsky? And so rich. Superrich. Rich beyond the comprehension of most people. My comprehension too. With so much dough, I was thinking, you bypassed democracy. You signaled that you were grateful for the opportunities democratic capitalist America had given you; meantime, in your inmost mind, you have streaked away on your own, you have grasped yourself as a pharaoh, the representative of the sun.
‘I wanted to talk about Frances Jellicoe,’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Her dinner party. I’ve always liked Frances. Are you there often?’
‘No. She bought some Chinese pieces from me …’
‘You deal in that stuff.’
‘Antiquities …’
‘Why, sure. You import them in damaged condition from China and you fix ’em up in Guatemala City with cheap labor.’
‘You’ve researched me,’ I said. Not that it mattered; my operation, my racket, was sufficiently legal.
‘No harm in it,’ said Adletsky. ‘I saw you looking on, at Frances.’
‘A bad moment that was,’ I said.
‘Yes, the husband – the ex – is a loser, an obvious no-good. Frances’s mother was what the Tribune in the old days called “a social leader.” The Potter Palmers, the McCormicks, and other micks whose husbands were chairmen of boards and whose daughters had “coming out” parties – Frances was one of those.’
‘Yes, I’ve met ladies who knew her at finishing school. She was a slim gentle creature, once …’
He looked curiously at me when I said ‘gentle creature,’ as if surprised that a man who looked like me should put things in such a way. ‘But you mean now she’s built like a brick shithouse,’ Adletsky said.
‘And then again, her health is very bad – she’s fragile, her life is in danger. She has that terrible cortisone swelling, and it makes her look like Babe Ruth.’
‘Of course; that’s the right description,’ said Adletsky.
‘You don’t need me, Mr Adletsky,’ I said. ‘Not with the intelligence-gathering service that told you everything there is to know about the Guatemala side of my operation.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you don’t have such a research facility. You have to think, you have to notice and put facts together for yourself. Now that Rourke, the ex-husband, has done himself in the eye. Here is an executive – he made a student from Greenland pregnant, an Eskimo girl. And she sued. Right? That’s an item. It’s been in the papers.’
‘Frances and Rourke were divorced years ago. But he remained on the board of various corporations.’
‘Go on,’ Adletsky said. ‘We both think highly of her. And we can’t hurt Frances by laying out the data.’
‘Her father was an Insull partner,’ I said. ‘And her grandfather a founder of Commonwealth Edison. She got Rourke made a paid corporate officer in half a dozen other companies.’