Him With His Foot in His Mouth by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141971155
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

Lawyers, lawyers. Why did I need all these lawyers? you will ask. Because I loved my brother fondly. Because we did business, and business can’t be done without lawyers. They have built a position for themselves at the very heart of money – strength at the core of what is strongest. Some of the cheerfulest passages in Walish’s letter refer to my horrible litigation. He says, ‘I always knew you were a fool.’ Himself, he took the greatest pains never to be one. Not that any man can ever be absolutely certain that his prudence is perfect. But to retain lawyers is clear proof that you’re a patsy. There I concede that Walish is right.

My brother, Philip, had offered me a business proposition, and that, too, was my fault. I made the mistake of telling him how much money my music-appreciation book had earned. He was impressed. He said to his wife, ‘Tracy, guess who’s loaded!’ Then he asked, ‘What are you doing with it? How do you protect yourself against taxes and inflation?’

I admired my brother, not because he was a ‘creative businessman,’ as they said in the family – that meant little to me – but because … Well, there is in fact no ‘because,’ there’s only the given, a lifelong feeling, a mystery. His interest in my finances excited me. For once he spoke seriously to me, and this turned my head. I told him, ‘I never even tried to make money, and now I’m knee-deep in the stuff.’ Such a statement was a little disingenuous. It was, if you prefer, untrue. To take such a tone was also a mistake, for it implied that money wasn’t so hard to make. Brother Philip had knocked himself out for it while Brother Harry had earned heaps of it, incidentally, while fiddling. This, I now acknowledge, was a provocative booboo. He made a dark note of it. I even saw the note being made.

As a boy, Philip was very fat. We had to sleep together when we were children and it was like sharing the bed with a dugong. But since then he had firmed up quite a lot. In profile his face was large, with bags under the eyes, a sharp serious face upon a stout body. My late brother was a crafty man. He laid long-distance schemes. Over me he enjoyed the supreme advantage of detachment. My weakness was my fondness for him, contemptible in an adult male. He slightly resembled Spencer Tracy, but was more avid and sharp. He had a Texas tan, his hair was ‘styled,’ not barbered, and he wore Mexican rings on every one of his fingers.

Gerda and I were invited to visit his estate near Houston. Here he lived in grandeur, and when he showed me around the place he said to me, ‘Every morning when I open my eyes I say, “Philip, you’re living right in the middle of a park. You own a whole park.” ’

I said, ‘It certainly is as big as Douglas Park in Chicago.

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