Augie March--Part 5

p.374--"Head thrown back, Trotsky regarded and estimated the vast church, and with a jump in which hardly anything elderly appeared he went up the stairs and hastened in." The unanticipated appearance of Trotsky in the narrative was presented in a way that reminded me of the introduction of Napoleon as a character in War and Peace, which I have noted always makes a great impression on people when they read that book. ("Hey! It's Napoleon!"). Augie glosses on this feeling in the next paragraph: "I too wanted to go in; I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave...of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay...it's stirring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things."

The subplot involving the wretched Oliver, an all-around second-rate man on the lam from U.S. authorities mainly for his subordinate associations with more substantial criminals, is very well done. The gradual buildup revealing the pertinent facts of the case as it comes to relate to Augie, the pathetic details--there are few more pathetic or awful stories than a cowardly guilty man without friends, resources, guile, daring, etc, running hopelessly from the police who can barely conceal their ecstasy at the prospect of such an easy triumph--is handled admirably by keeping the sordid part of it in the main peripheral while the emphasis in the main body of the plot of course is on what a stroke of fortune this turns out to be for Augie (Oliver's hot blonde girlfriend comes to him for assistance in escaping from the other).

pp.401-2--"But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so mighty...you produce a someone who can exist before it."

While I just praised the handling of the Oliver subplot, most of the plot contrivances and transitions in the later parts of the book had a much more awkward, forced air about them. There are many strange, incongruous positions and acquaintances, symbolic and extreme situations succeeding each other fairly rapidly which left me overall with a sense of vague dissatisfaction. This may seem like nitpicking but this is a book that has been held up by many people as a work of very great importance in world literature and I don't see that. It approaches living at that level at times in its episodes, but taken on the whole the world represented in it just does not resonate enough in the mind as being that real.

p.424--"Well, people don't trust you if they don't know what you do, and you can't blame them."

p.425--"I drew a drape aside and saw we were on the twentieth story at least. I hadn't had a look at Chicago yet since my return. Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgement that would never find its word." I don't like this much, though a) it succeeds in imposing an idea that probably contains a decent amount of truth in it, and b) this is a perfect specimen of the type of writing that Americans seemed to embrace as embodying the national spirit in the 20th century. I think the problem is that it leaves the writer, and indeed anything recognizably human, or intellectual, or whimsical, too much outside the description. Description of place to work I think must offer a mirror, and an enlightening one, back onto the mind, or soul, of the describer, and these hard black straps of rails and shuddering vapors do not do that sufficiently in themselves.

pp.425-6--Having said what I just have, this description is much more successful: "He dressed me in a double-breasted-flannel, very elegant soft gray. It certainly was my fortune to be poor in style. From the skin out he reclothed me in swell linen and silk socks, new shoes and called the maid to have my old suit cleaned and sent to me--it was sort of shiny on the elbows. The other stuff he ordered her to throw down the incinerator." The incinerator is a very evocative touch. p.428--"One thing that disturbed her was that without having a cent I seemed perfectly at home with many of the satisfactions that the rich enjoy."

There are many times when I think this author, education-wise, is not so different from me, that we know pretty roughly the same things, the same facts. Obviously you have a difference of personality that is large, and probably of will. Also the circumstance that time has marched on and a man of my generation is expected to know different things than a man in 1942 would have known, and I don't know them.

p.434--(Clem to Augie) "You are a man of feeling."

p.439--"For a long time he was mad on Great Books and he used to buy space in the want ads and put in quotations from Plato or Locke. Like, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.'" Of course the Great Books guy is a hopeless freak who can't accomplish anything and has thousands of roaches overrunning his mansion (he is a millionaire at least).

p.455--"Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spend forty, fifty, sixty years like that within the walls of his being. And all great experience would only take place within the walls of his being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, montrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would only be a terrible, hideous dream about existing." Yes, well. it is true that it is not quite the same thing as what the greatest people think of as life, but mainstream existence certainly seems to be heading ever more in this general direction.

The women Bellow's heroes get involved with are always depicted as being knockout/bombshell type beautiful, not just to him but as something that would be obvious to anyone who saw them. I am skeptical as to their really being that beautiful in the particular way that they are presented as being anyway--however good-looking a woman is, it is unusual that one forms no other, more complex impression of them after a very short time--but it also has the effect of curtailing any real idea of what these women can be supposed to look like, other than as dolls representing various sexual types.

p.480--"When is your birthday?" "In January." "I'd have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It's barometric--you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived."

I of course was born in January. As was my wife.