The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [50]
CHAPTER VI
What did I, out of all this, want for myself? I couldn't have told you. My brother Simon wasn't much my senior, and he and others at our age already had got the idea there was a life to lead and had chosen their directions, while I was circling yet. And Einhom, what services he needed of me he pretty well knew, but what I was to get from him wasn't at all clear. I know I longed very much, but I didn't understand for what. Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of maturity, common enough and boring to make an extended showing of, there are, or are supposed to be, silken, unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with stones and golden snakes who scatter from their knots into the fissures of Eryx. Early scenes of life, I mean; for each separate person too, everyone beginning with Eden and passing through trammels, pains, distortions, and death into the darkness out of which, it is hinted, we may hope to enter permanently into the beginning again. There is horror of grayness, of the death-forerunning pinch, of scandalous mouth or of fear-eyes, and of whatever is caused by no recollection of happiness and no expectation of it either. But when there is no shepherd-Sicily, no free-hand nature-painting, but deep city vexation instead, and you are forced early into deep city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service in the temple, nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogota, but land in a poolroom--what can that lead to of the highest? And what happiness or misery-antidote can it offer instead of pipes and sheep or musical, milk-drinking innocence, or even merely nature walks with a pasty instructor in goggles, or fiddle lessons? Friends, human pals, men and brethren, there is no brief, digest, or shorthand way to say where it leads. Crusoe, alone with nature, under heaven, had a busy, com84 ;: plicated time of it with the unhuman itself, and I am in a crowd that yields results with much more difficulty and reluctance and am part of it myself. Dingbat, too, for a short while, had his effect on me, speaking of deep city aims. He thought there was a lot he could teach me thai even his brother couldn't. I learned about Dingbat that he was full of the thought of justifying himself before the Commissioner and Einhom and aimed to produce a success, one that was characteristic of him. He swore he would, that it was in him to make a fortune and a reputation, and he wanted to glitter as a promoter, announced on the radio among the personalities that pass through the ring before the main event, his specs like diamonds. Now and then he got a fighter to manage, somebody mesmerizable. And at this time he became the manager of a heavyweight. At last, he said, he had a good one. Nails Nagel. Dingbat had had middles and welters, but a good heavyweight fighter was the biggest dough of all, provided he was championship material, which, Dingbat declared--cried out in his sincerest ready-for-battle assertion--Nails was. Nails sometimes allowed himself to think so too; at heart probably not, or he would have thrown himself full time into it and stopped going back to his job in the auto-wrecking yard. He was both slow and spasmodic in the way he used-the grime-crowned hands that ended his rugged white arms, lashed with extra reinforcements of sinew at the joints. His dull and black jaw was similarly reinforced, and it backed stiffly down on his shaven throat to shelter from punches; the top of his head was surrounded by a cap and the visor stuck forward over lair-hidden eyes. Hurt, decent manhood, meaning no wrong or harm, a horsehair coil or ragged ball of slob virility, that was what he made you feel. He was very strong