NEW YORK JEW by Alfred Kazin

Author:Alfred Kazin [Kazin, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5126-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter VI

NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD

Back from the wars, and not an apartment to be had in the great rich city of New York. Landlords liked to say the city was “full.” Every time I was turned away, I had an image of people after a big meal, rubbing their stomachs. A painter friend of Saul Bellow’s, suddenly in the money doing covers for Fortune, bought a house in the country and gave me his ramshackle old studio on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights.

The painter was kind, large, oracular. He went in for explanations in a deep, deep voice, a voice that seemed to rumble cosmic theories from the storm center of his belly. Even when his sentences were not fully formed, his explanations were total. The studio, which should have been in pieces, was a tribute to his handiness, his superb confidence. He was a great explainer of his friends to themselves. Bellow was to put him into the lifeboat scene near the end of Augie March. He is a mad scientist who has synthesized protoplasm and wants Augie to join him in further biochemical triumphs. At the moment, their ship having just been torpedoed, Augie is alone with him in the lifeboat and has to listen, listen, listen. When Augie came out in 1953, I roared at Bellow’s growing sense of the ridiculous, of a world gone ridiculous. “Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!” Bellow’s friends were always intellectuals, and intellectuals were his favorite targets. He felt himself cursed by them, enthralled, condemned to know only people who were one part of himself. “Did you recognize the man in the lifeboat?” he proudly asked me. He was astonished, outraged that I hadn’t seen the exact resemblance. “It’s your old landlord Amos!” he stormed. Like Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Isaac Rosenfeld, and many other once old-fashioned moralists, Bellow had been through a Reichian analysis and had learned to demand his rights at all times and with all people. We had been liberated. As Bellow became famous, his sense of his great powers was affronted by the stupidity of others. It would be my function in life, like that of all critics, to disappoint him.

My landlord was soon gone, and his sweet pomposity was not what I had to live with in Pineapple Street. The many pictures he left on the walls—“my real work, not that money work I do for Luce”—were of emaciated rabbis standing behind barbed wire in Nazi camps, skeletal young maidens drooping under the contempt of Nazi guards, Jewish children with eyes like black marbles waiting their turn to the gas chambers. The pictures wore a glossy impasto thick as chicken fat, and were hideously overcolored. Even in the dark they threatened me. Yet they surrounded me with such an air of judgment—Kazin had done nothing, we had done nothing, but look at us!—that after a week it occurred to me to take them down. They were bad, sick pictures. In New York outrage was easy.

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