Collected Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141389295
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Altogether an admirable person, and a complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art. The model on which he formed himself has been wiped out. In the late thirties he and I went to the fights together, or the Club de Lisa for jazz.

Cousin Mendy was the man to approach on Scholem’s behalf because there was a fund, somewhere, set up by a relative dead these many years, the last of his branch. As I understood its provisions, this fund was set up to make essential family loans and also to pay for the education of poor relations, if they were gifted, perhaps even for their higher cultural activities. Vague about it myself, I was sure that Mendy would know, and I quickly got hold of him on the telephone. He said he would come downtown next day, delighted, he told me, to have a talk. “Been far too long, old buddy.”

The fund was the legacy of an older Eckstine, Arcadius, called Artie. Artie, of whom nothing was expected and who had never in his life tied his shoelaces, not because he was too stout (he was only plump) but because he announced to the world that he was dégagé, had come into some money toward the end of his life. Before the Revolution, he had brought to America a Russian schoolboy’s version of Pushkin’s life, and he gave Pushkin recitations incomprehensible to us. Modern experience had never touched him. Viewed from above, Arties round, brownish-fair head was the head of a boy, combed with boyish innocence. He grew somewhat puffy in the cheeks and eyelids. His eyes were kiwi green. He lost one of his fingers in a barbed-wire factory in 1917. Perhaps he sacrificed it to avoid the draft. There is a “cabinet portrait” of Artie and his widowed mother, taken about seventy years ago. He poses with his thumb under his lapel. His mother, Tanya, is stout, short, and Oriental. Although she looks composed, her face is in reality inflated with laughter. Why? Well, if her legs are so plump and short that they don’t reach the floor, the cause is a comical deficiency in the physical world, ludicrously incapable of adapting itself to Aunt Tanya. Tanya’s second marriage was to a millionaire junkman, prominent in his synagogue, a plain man and strictly Orthodox. Tanya, a movie fan, loved Clark Gable and never missed a performance of Gone with the Wind. “Oy, Clark Gebble, I love him so!”

Her old husband was the first to die. She followed in her mideighties, five years later. At the time of her death, Artie was a traveler in dehydrated applesauce and was demonstrating his product in a small downstate department store when the news came. He and his wife, a childless couple, retired at once. He said he would resume his study of philosophy, in which he had majored at Ann Arbor God knows how many years ago, but the management of his property and money kept him from the books.

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