Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [228]
“I miss you this minute, and what’s more Flonzaley knows it. But one advantage of his business is that it’s made him very basic. You once said to me that Flonzaley’s point of view must be Plutonian—whatever that meant. I put it that his trade is gloomy but his character is roomy. He doesn’t insist that I shouldn’t love you. Don’t forget that I didn’t run away with a stranger. I went back to him. When we parted at Idlewild, I didn’t know I was going to do it. But I got out of patience with you. There are too many zigzags in your temperament. Both of us need more serious arrangements.”
Wait a minute. She said this and she said that, but was she giving me up because I was about to go broke? That would never be a problem with Flonzaley. Probably Renata knew that I was beginning to think about a more austere sort of life. I hadn’t renounced my money out of principle. Urbanovich was taking it from me, and that was just as well. But I was beginning to see the American dollar-drive for what it was. It had assumed the proportions of a cosmic force. It stood between us and the real forces. But no sooner had I thought this than I understood one of Renata’s reasons for giving me up—she gave me up because I thought such thoughts as this. In her own way, she was telling me so.
“Now you can write your big essay on boredom, and maybe the human race will be grateful. It’s suffering, and you want to help. It’s a wonderful thing to knock yourself out over these deep problems, but personally I don’t care to be around when you’re doing it. I admit you’re smart. That’s all right with me. You should be as tolerant toward undertakers as I am toward intellectuals. When it comes to men, my judgments are completely female-human, regardless of race, creed, or previous condition of servitude, as Lincoln said. Congratulations, your intelligence is terrific. Still I agree with your old sweetie Naomi Lutz. I don’t want to get involved in all this spiritual, intellectual, universal stuff. As a beautiful woman and still young, I prefer to take things as billions of people have done throughout history. You work, you get bread, you lose a leg, kiss some fellows, have a baby, you live to be eighty and bug hell out of everybody, or you get hung or drowned. But you don’t spend years trying to dope your way out of the human condition. To me that’s boring.” Yes, when she said this, I saw thinkers of genius throwing skeins of belief and purpose over the heads of the multitude. I saw them molesting the race with their fancies, programs, and world-perspectives. Not that the race itself was guiltless. But it had incredible abilities to work, to feel, to believe, which it was asked to bestow here, bestow there by those who were convinced that they knew best and abused mankind with projects. “And you never asked me,” she went on, “but I have my own beliefs. I believe I live in nature. I think that when you’re dead you’re dead, and that’s that. And this is what Flonzaley stands for. Dead is dead, and the man’s trade is with stiffs, and I’m his wife now. Flonzaley performs a practical service for society. Like the plumber, the sewage department, or the garbage collector, he says. But you do people good and then they turn around and have a prejudice against you. In a way it’s like my own personal situation. Flonzaley accepts the occupational stigma but there’s a slight charge for that, and he adds it to the bill. Some of your ideas are spookier than his business. He keeps things in their compartments. The color of one frame doesn’t leak into the next.”
Here she wasn’t being straight. This glowing person Renata, wonderful to me because she was in the Biblical sense unclean, had made my life richer with the thrills of deviation and broken laws. If Flonzaley, because of pollution by the dead, was comparably wonderful to her, why didn