Augie March--Part 3

p.194--"Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering."

p. 203--"Clem had a vast idea of what things there were to be had, which was quite natural when you consider how it wounded and stung him to believe that they were out of his reach. He meant, I know, money, admiration, women made absolutely helpless before you by love. The goods of fortune. He was disturbed by these thousand things, and, sometimes, so was I. He insisted that I should be going somewhere, at least that I should be practicing how to go, that I should concentrate on how to be necessary, and not be backward but energetic, absolute, and so forth."

p.209--"I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first stale and then poisonous because their manageresses' thoughts were on the conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by curtains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery". All references to the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man must be recorded on a site such as this.

p.212--Mimi Villars, who comes across as a sort of proto-Ayn Rand girl, philosophically dedicated to free love with men of strength, opposed to bourgeois entanglements and compromises, etc, on her sister's getting a divorce: "I hope now she'll get under the sheets with a young strong stevedore." This reminded me of the scene in Mansfield Park when the narrator, speaking for Fanny, declares with chilling finality of the boring fiance who has terrible conversational skills that "he was an inferior young man." I guess this is because in both instances harsh, forceful, and probably accurate, judgements are being passed on the superiority or inferiority of individual men by women possessing intelligence and, especially in the case of Mimi Villars, desirability enough to give them real sting.


pp.237-8--"But luxury as the power itself is different--luxury without anything ulterior...in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn't nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great--the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won't serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy."


p.244--"...Mimi Villars would have said, no compliment intended, that she was a wife, the whole wifely racket. In other words, minor sensuality and no trouble."


p.267-8--Jimmy Klein on marriage & fatherhood:"It's all that you want from life comes to you as one single thing--fucking; so you and some nice kid get together, and after a while you have more misery than before, only now it's more permanent...You're set up like the July fourth rocket...Just charge enough to explode you. Up. Then the stick falls down after the flash. You live to bring up the kid and oblige your wife."

I was in Chicago only one time, four years ago. Especially approaching from the west, as it happened I did on this occasion, it truly does emerge out of the plains as an oasis of humanity when compared with going anywhere in the northeast U.S. Alone among the midwestern cities I have seen (St Louis, Dayton, Indianapolis) it retains some semblance of identity and ties to the past, though it too is certainly well past its prime. It reminded me of Philadelphia and Boston, (although the latter area has been changing rapidly the last ten years or so) in that it still has, albeit mainly in the outlying areas of the city and older suburbs, a large population rooted in the area for many generations that is culturally working class and works to maintain at least some of the modest traditions of these cities. These are the people who eat the signature unhealthy foods, drink the very bad but beloved local beers, keep a few parades and firehouses and Catholic schools running, maintain an emotional relationship with the local sports franchises that is 40 or 50 years out of date, and so on. Chicago also had a real second-tier golden age from about 1890-1930/40, even though no one realized it at the time, the lingering aura of which at least as a visitor I felt at once whenever I entered a well-preserved building or bar or came upon a vista from that era. Wrigley Field exudes this atmosphere of old Chicago as the most rawly American of cities in the days when American cities were much livelier and rougher and far more potentially beautiful places than most of them are today, which is why many people will always stop and watch a game being played there on television for a few minutes independent of any actual interest in the teams playing.

As a literary city I am at times inclined to rate Chicago equal to New York, at least during the 1900-1940 period. New York writing is like the gunning point guard in basketball who takes 40 shots in a game, most of unnecessary difficulty, and makes 12, making his overall scoring average still quite high, while Chicago writers of this era were more like the power forward who has difficulty getting the ball passed to him even when he`s open but manages to make economical use of his shots and get to the foul line enough to end up with a solid game. Except for Bellow, none of the more famous Chicago writers--Sinclair, Dreiser, Sandburg, Dos Passos, Farrell, Richard Wright--has a really high reputation among literary people today, though I don`t know why Dos Passos doesn`t (Hemingway, though he was from Oak Park, never to my knowledge wrote about the city at all). The doggedly unintellectual man of the people Studs Terkel is of a classic strain of American writer that may become extinct with his demise (the audience for such authors appears to have spontaneously combusted or something already). Still, if you do read a lot, and not just about literature, but sports history and music history and about business and socialists and on and on, the place, and what it must have been like, does occupy a lot of room in the imagination. One senses that a lot was going on and at a very subconscious level in great part too. But I have to get on with the rest of the article.

p.275--This is what I thought college talk would be more like:``You`ve never been between this doll`s legs? You`ve been living next door to her without touching her? Listen, we`re no more ten years old, kid. I`ve seen that tramp. She wouldn`t let you alone even if you wanted to be let alone. And you didn`t. Don`t try to tell me you`re not horny...``

Though I joke about this dialogue, I should note that in the book it relates to an abortion that the author devoted a large section of the book to, that was very roughly and shoddily done and resulted in terrible complications, fever, bleeding, etc, which the official medical establishments of the time wanted no part in treating. My tendency is to assume that extended accounts of abortions, especially where there are lots of instinctive reactions by other people in response to the event, are supposed to convey some idea of vital importance to the story, but I can never figure out what exactly it is. Is the instinct the problem in such cases? Is it the manner, the tone, of the action or response? Most great and would-be great authors seek to appeal to the better part of our humanity when confronted with crises as well as to define what that appropriately is. Clearly something of the sort is at work here.