Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [34]
I was not so completely unrealistic that I failed to ask myself whether by a sensible person I meant myself. Returning from the bank I shaved, and I noticed how my face, framed to be cheerful, taking a metaphysical premise of universal helpfulness, asserting that the appearance of mankind on this earth was on the whole a good thing—how this face, filled with premises derived from capitalist democracy, was now depressed, retracted in unhappiness, sullen, unpleasant to shave. Was I the aforementioned sensible person?
I performed a few impersonal operations. I did a little ontogeny and phylogeny on myself. Recapitulation: the family was called Tsitrine and came from Kiev. The name was Anglicized at Ellis Island. I was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the birthplace also of Harry Houdini with whom I think I have some affinities. I grew up in Polish Chicago, I went to the Chopin Grammar School, I spent my eighth year in the public ward of a TB sanatorium. Good people donated piles of colored funny papers to the sanatorium. These were stacked high beside each bed. The children followed the adventures of Slim Jim and Boob McNutt. In addition, day and night, I read the Bible. One visit a week was allowed, my parents taking turns, my mother with her bosom in old green serge, big-eyed, straight-nosed, and white with worry—her deep feelings inhibited her breathing—and my father the immigrant desperate battler coming from the frost, his coat saturated with cigarette smoke. Kids hemorrhaged in the night and choked on blood and were dead. In the morning the white geometry of made-up beds had to be coped with. I became very thoughtful here and I think that my disease of the lungs passed over into an emotional disorder so that I sometimes felt, and still feel, poisoned by eagerness, a congestion of tender impulses together with fever and enthusiastic dizziness. Owing to the TB I connected breathing with joy, and owing to the gloom of the ward I connected joy with light, and owing to my irrationality I related light on the walls to light inside me. I appear to have become a Hallelujah and Glory type. Furthermore (concluding) America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good—an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done? When Humboldt called me an ingénu, wasn’t this what he was getting at? Crystallizing many evils in himself, poor fellow, he died as an example, his legacy a question addressed to the public. The death question itself, which Walt Whitman saw as the question of questions.
At all events I didn’t care a bit for the way I looked in the mirror. I saw angelic precipitates condensing into hypocrisy, especially around my mouth. So I finished shaving by touch and only opened my eyes when I started to dress. I chose a quiet suit and necktie. I didn’t want to provoke Cantabile by appearing showy.
I didn’t have to wait long for the elevator. It was just past dog time in my building. During dog-walking hours it’s hopeless, you have to use the stairs. I went out to my dented car which, in maintenance alone, ran me fifteen hundred dollars per annum. In the street the air was bad. It was the pre-Christmas season, dark December, and a brown air, more gas than air, crossed the lake from the great steel-and-oil complex of South Chicago, Hammond, and Gary, Indiana. I got in and started the engine, also turning on the radio. When the music began I wished that there might be more switches