Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [117]
the money in that particular book and then forgot even its title. Maybe I didn't want to hear any more than that about sin. Just as it was, it was perfect, and I might have been afraid the guy would spoil it when he went on. Anyway, I am the inspirational, and not the systematic, type. Besides, if I wasn't going to abide by that one sentence, what good would it do to read the entire book? No, I haven't ever been calm enough to read, and there was a time when I would have dumped my father's books to the pigs if I'd thought it might do them good. Such a supply of books confused me. When I started to read something about France, I realized I didn't know anything about Rome, which came first, and then Greece, and then Egypt, going backward all the time to the primitive abyss. As a matter of fact, I didn't know enough to read one single book. Eventually I found the only things I could enjoy were things like _The Romance of Surgery, The Triumph over Pain,__ or medical biographies--like Osier, Cushing, Semmelweis, and Metchnikoff. And owing to my attachment to Wilfred Grenfell I became interested in Labrador, Newfoundland, the Arctic Circle, and finally the Eskimos. You would have thought that Lily would have gone along with me on the Eskimos, but she didn't, and I was very disappointed. The Eskimos are stripped down to essentials and I thought they would appeal to her because she is such a basic type. Well, she is, and then again, she is not. She's not naturally truthful. Look at the way she lied about all her fianc� And I'm not sure that Hazard did punch her in the eye on the way to the wedding. How can I be? She told me her mother was dead while the old woman was still living. She lied too about the carpet, for it was the one on which her father shot himself. I am tempted to say that ideas make people untruthful. Yes, they frequently lead them into lies. Lily is something of a blackmailer, also. You know I dearly love that big broad, and for my own amusement sometimes I like to think of her part by part. I start with a hand or a foot or even a toe and go to all the limbs and joints. It gives me wonderful satisfaction. One breast is smaller than the other, like junior and senior; her pelvic bones are not well covered, she is a little gaunt there. But her body looks gentle and pretty. Moreover her face blushes white, which touches me more than anything else. Nevertheless she is reckless and a spendthrift and doesn't keep the house clean and is a con artist and exploits me. Before we were married, I wrote about twenty letters for her all over the place, to the State Department and a dozen or so missions. _She used me as a character reference.__ She was going to Burma or to Brazil, and the implied threat was that I would never see her again. I was on the spot. I couldn't louse her up to all these people. But when we were married and I wanted to spend our honeymoon camping among the Copper Eskimos, she wouldn't hear of it. Anyway (still on the subject of books) I read Freuchen and Gontran de Poncins and practiced living out of doors in winter. I built an igloo with a knife and during zero weather Lily and I fell out because she wouldn't bring the kids and sleep with me under skins as the Eskimos do. I wanted to try that. I looked through all the readings Dahfu had given me. I knew they were supposed to have a bearing on lions and yet, page after page, not one single reference to any lion. I felt like groaning, like snoozing, like anything except tackling such hard material on this hot African day when the sky was as blue as grain alcohol is white. The first article, which I picked because the opening paragraph looked easy, was signed Scheminsky, and it was not easy at all. But I fought it until I came across the term Obersteiner's allochiria, and there I broke down. I thought, "Hell! What is it all about! Because I told the king I wanted to be a doctor, he thinks I have medical training. I'd better straighten him out on this." The stuff was just too difficult. But anyway I gave it the best that was in me. I skipped over Obersteiner's