Augie March Part 2


The first note I made was on the frequency of retarded characters in American literature, as Augie's little brother Georgie (also my youngest son's name by the way) is an "idiot". Benjy in The Sound and the Fury immediately comes to mind, and there is also an important retarded character in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I had thought of another major one but I can't remember it now. This is not even counting movies like Forrest Gump (the mentally handicapped character appears to be especially prominent in works originating in the South) or Bill (remember that one? It starred Mickey Rooney as a retarded old man). This is a unique characteristic of our literature, and perhaps of our humanity. The French, for example, I think do not do retarded people in their art. They have no use for them, requiring all their agents to be articulate and conscious and sensual. The Greeks would seem to have little interest in such characters also, for similar reasons, plus the necessity of the figures of their dramas to take actions.


Early on I remarked that the book seemed overwritten at times, thought this impression did subside considerably once the story got rolling. As I noted in the last post I also find a lot of his learned references come across as awkward, especially in this book where Augie, who is the narrator, never really comes across as having become the sort of person who would instinctively compare a scene encountered while hustling on the streets of Chicago with an incident from the Roman senate. He is always portrayed as too much of that street culture to do that.


The name "Augie", which was generally I believe a diminutive of August, seems as if it should be due for a comeback. I rather like it. There were a number of ballplayers in the 30s and 40s with the name, most notably Augie Galan, who was a slap-hitting outfielder with the Cubs and Dodgers, leading the league in runs scored in 1935 (133!), walks in 1943 and 44, (103 & 101), and stolen bases in 1935 & 37 (22 & 23; it was not a running era).


p.57--"Mama showed at last the trembling anger of weak people that it takes much to bring on."


I was greatly endeared to Einhorn by his love of Coca-Cola, which I indulge in almost to excess as well. Other literary Coke lovers were Ganesh and his wife in The Mystic Masseur, or at least they broke out the Coke whenever guests came to the house. However I interpreted that these two were supposed to be understood as foolish characters, while Einhorn is insisted upon numerous times as having been "a great man".


p.65--"I understand that British aristocrats are still legally entitled to piss, if they should care to, on the hind wheels of carriages."


p.67--Einhorn "had dynastic ideas...the organizer coming after the conqueror, the poet and philosopher succeeding the organizer, and the whole development typically American, the work of intelligence and strength in an open field, a world of possibilities."


p.76 "...the true vision of things is a gift, particularly in times of special disfigurement and world-wide Babylonishness"


p.86--"I was reading where Tex Rickard wrote the other day in the Post, that before the Willard fight, when it was a hundred in the shade out there in Ohio, Dempsey was trained so fine that when he took a nap before the event, in his underwear, they were crisp and there wasn't a drop of sweat on him."


There was a J.P. Morgan reference at one point. One of these years I should do an article on J.P. Morgan as someone who held a dominating position in the American psyche through several of its most important decades. It is virtually impossible to read a novel, set in the industrial states at least, written between 1900 and 1950 that does not at some point invoke the spectre of this awesome captain of industry, and really, as much a father of our modern nation, in numerous ways, as anyone.

For much of the book the main problem I had with it was that the Augie character was never very vivid for me. It became a little clearer towards the end, mainly as a result of his own explanations, but still, major aspects of his character, such as his attractiveness to several extremely desirable-sounding women, and his autodidactic learning of the classics, are not really convincing. In fact, where the women are concerned, this is a fairly constant difficulty in all of Bellow's books, figuring out why the particular ones he writes about would be at all interested in the characters he gives them to.


p.135--"You know nothing about girls; girls want to marry. And it's not in the modest old times when they sat on it till somebody would have mercy."


p. 142--"With you? I should say not. I certainly won't." This is what the impossibly gorgeous Esther Frenchel says when Augie asks her to go dancing at the house of David. He recovers of course. The author is trying to show us that to be a real hero you have to bring your game to the hottest girls and learn to be unaffected by their disdain. And he's right.


On the other hand our author's penchant for introducing vocabulary and learned allusions into situations and the thoughts of a narrator where they could not be expected to arise spontaneously mainly serve to reveal his middle-class origins. The worst writer for this sort of thing (besides me) is John Fowles, who was actually very talented and certainly had a high I.Q., but who unfortunately has the habit of forever straining to demonstrate that this is the case. Bellow was less constrained in this way, as the cultural intelligentsia in the U.S. is not a terribly forbidding lot, and one can always do an end run around them by garnering European approval, but he still writes at times as if he considers himself to be accountable to some exalted body of people outside of his familiar connections.


p.155--This is a specimen of Bellovian writing that I don't care for: "His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dryness of days, dreariness and shabbiness--mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous.`` Halfway through this sentence I felt like I was the one lost in a bad neighborhood.

p.162--``As for the immigrants, my thought about them was, Hell, why shouldn`t they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There`s enough to go around of everything including hard luck.``

p.166--Erie, Pennsylvania gets dissed: ``To get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just materialized, waiting.``

p.166--``...people in great numbers were on the highways.`` The wanderers on the roads and the hoboes riding the trains in the 30s are noted by just about every writer of the period. Clearly this was a significant and deeply impressionable phenomenon. The figure of the hobo remained a staple of songs, comedy routines, films and TV shows and books well into the 1960s, and while always treated as an outsider, was a familiar one. I make this observation because there seems to be a fashion current in conservative ideological circles and among economists to argue that the sufferings of Americans during the Depression have been greatly exaggerated, that the New Deal actually exacerbated such disaster as there was, that Roosevelt was overrated and ineffective as a leader, etc. Such people always fail to take into account the day-to-day psychological impact on a society of huge numbers of grown men reduced to beggary, homelessness, tramping and the suspicion at least of criminality, especially when most people`s financial situations are precarious enough that they are not too far from being in the same position, and affect to be confused when they demand dramatic short-term actions to solve problems rather than adopt rational long-term strategies to improve their lots. Roosevelt became popular despite the questionable direct economic successes of his programs because a lot of people perceived him as acknowledging their existences, and even seemed to entertain the possibility that they might be important to the national life, which is why he was able to win election four times and galvanize the incredible national unity of the 1940s that people so much lament the collapse of today.

Along a similar theme, this book gives a good flavor of the old industrial midwest that we have lost now. Even in the depression with all the hoboes around the impression made is still of a comparatively bustling, crowded place compared with what is left of it now. Diners are full at 11pm, train stations (and trains) are crowded, factories churn, the farm fields are full of activity. Perhaps this life was no more communal or vigorous or interesting than the mall and drive-through culture that we have today but it certainly seems like it was.

p.183--Description of what a man should not be: ``...a man-chick, plucked and pinched, with scraggle behind and anxious face full of sorrow-wrinkles, human fowl chased by brooms.``