The Adventures of Augie March

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at the things I as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heracitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Grandma Lausch was our boarder, not a relation at all. She was supported by two sons, one from Cincinnati an done from Racine, Wisconsin. The daughters-in-law did not want her, and she, the widow of a powerful Odessa businessman […] preferred to live with us, because for so many years she was used to direct a house, to command, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise, and intrigue in all her languages. She boasted French and German besides Russian, Polish, and Yiddish; and who but Mr. Lulov, the retouch artist from Division Street, could have tested her claim to French?

There was always much money in sight, in cups, glasses, jars and spread on Coblin’s desk. They seemed sure I wouldn’t take any, and probably everything was so lavish I never did. I was easily appealed to in this way, provided that I was given credit for understanding what the setup was, as when Grandma sent me on a mission. I could put my heart into a counterfeit too, just as easily. So don’t think I’m trying to put over that, if handled right, a Cato could have been made of me, or a young Lincoln who tramped four miles in a frontier zero gale to refund three cents to a customer. I don’t want to pass for having such legendary presidential stuff. Only those four miles wouldn’t have been a hinderance if the right feelings were kindled. It depended on which way I was drawn.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all? And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor, Iroquois posture and eagle bearing, the lithe step that didn’t crack a twig, the grace of a Chevalier Bayard and the hand of Cincinnatus at the plow, the industry of the Nassau Street match-boy who became the king of corporations. Without a special gift of vision, maybe you wouldn’t have seen it in most of us, lining up in the schoolyard on a red fall morning […]

Simon had a distinguished record here. President of the Loyal League, he wore the shield on his sweater, and was valedictorian. I didn’t have his singleness of purpose but was more diffuse, and anybody who offered entertainment could get me to skip and do the alleys for junk […]

Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman’s small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment. But power-robbed. Simon would say sometimes, “Wha’che know, Gram?”—even, occasionally, “Mrs. Lausch.” I never repudiated her that much or tried to strike the old influence, such as it had become, out of her hands. […]

The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out. […]

Winnie died in May of that year, and I laid her in a shoe box and buried her in the yard.

William Einhorn was the first superior man I knew. He had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philosophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take thought before an important decision and also (N.B.) if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I’d ask myself, “What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise Ulysses to do? What would Einhorn think?” I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list. It was him that I knew, and what I understand of them in him. Uless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy tale kings, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours.

It sometimes got my goat, he and Mrs. Einhorn made so sure I knew my place. But maybe they were right; the old woman had implanted the thought, though I never entertained it in earnest. However, there was such a thought, and it bulged somewhat into my indignation. Einhorn and his wife were selfish. They weren’t mean, I admitted in fairness, and generally I could be fair about it; merely selfish, like two people enjoying their lunch on the grass and not asking you to join them. If you weren’t dying for a sandwich yourself it could even make a pleasant picture, smacking on the mustard, cutting cake, peeling eggs and cucumbers. Selfish Einhorn was, nevertheless; his nose in constant action smelled, and smelled out everything, sometimes austerely, or again without manners, covert, half an eye out for observers but not to be deterred if there were any, either.

Simon had forefront ability. Maybe his reading was related to it, and the governor’s clear-eyed gaze he developed. Of John Sevier. Or of Jackson in the moment when the duelist’s bullet glanced off the large button of his cloak and he made ready to fire—a lifted look of unforgiving, cosmological captaincy; that look where honesty had the strength of a prejudice, and foresight appeared as the noble camp of impersonal worry in the forehead. My opinion is that at one time it was genuine in Simon. And if it was once genuine, how could you definitely say that the genuineness was ever all gone. But he used these things. He employed them, I knew damn well. And when they’re used consciously, do they turn spurious? Well, in a fight, who can lay off his advantages?

“Or were you looking for a thrill? […] Go to Riverview Park. But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You’ve got opposition in you. You don’t slide through everything. You just make it look so.”

This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say “No!” which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger.

The discoverer of this, who had taken pains to think of me—to think of me—I as full of love for him for it. But I was also wearing the discovered attribute, my opposition. I was clothed in it. So I couldn’t make any sign of argument or indicate how I felt.

It probably gave him some amusement, how I took to this sort of life.

There was a spell in which I mainly wished to own dinner clothes and be invited to formal parties and thought considerably about how to get into the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not that I had any business ideas. I was better than fair in the shop, but I had no wider inventiveness about money. It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness. The way a pair of tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match o the bow tie settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it.

The Fenchels had checked out. There was a note at the desk for me from Thea. “Esther told uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and then East. You were foolish last night. Think about it. It’s true I love you. You’ll see me again.”

Then I had a few rough days and got stretched out in melancholy. I thought, where did I get that way, putting in for the best there was in the departments of beauty and joy as if I were a count of happy youth, and like born to elegance and sweet love, with bones made of candy? And had to remember what very seldom mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage,

That I didn’t want to be adopted never spontaneously occurred to her, and she assumed, as if it were normal but not to be mentioned, something else: that, like everyone, I was self-seeking. So that if I had any objections in reserve, they’d be minor ones, and I’d keep them covered. Or if I had thoughts of helping my brothers or Mama, those thoughts would be bound up and kept in the back. She had never seen Mama and didn’t intend to; and when I told her in St. Joe that Simon was coming she didn’t ask to meet him. There was a little in it of Moses and the Pharoah’s daughter; only I wasn’t a bulrush-hidden infant by any means. I had family enough to suit me and history to be loyal to, not as though I had been gotten off a stockpile.

However, […] there is a darkness. It is for everyone. You don’t, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it […] Nor are lowered into it with visitor’s curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the envy of the rest of the mud-springing, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude […]

It needs to be explained that in Mimi’s hard view all that you inherited from the mixing people of the past and the chance of parents’ encountering like Texas cattle was your earthy material, which it was your own job to make into admirable flesh. In other words, applied to Sylvester, he was in large measure to blame for how he looked; his spirit was a bad kiln. And also it was his fault that he couldn’t keep his wives and girls. [… Mimi] supposed that they must take his little gloom for real devilishness and expect him to visit their places with prickles and fire, like a genuine demon; when he failed to, turning out to be mere uncompleted mud, they threw stones at him, real or figurative. She was savage-minded, Mimi, and prized her savagery as proof that there was no monkey business about her; she punished and took blows as the real thing.

Here the door opened on what supported the weight of this heaped-up life. The room had been refurnished for him and Charlotte with silk-shaded reading lamps, bedside fleeces, drapes against the alley view and its barbarity—as in a palazzo against the smell of the canals—a satin cover on the bed, and auxiliary pillows on the roll of the bolster.

To save steps to the dresser Simon walked on the bed. He changed clothes, letting things lie where they were dropped or flung, kicking his shoes into the corner and drying the sweat from his naked body with an undershirt. There were days when he changed three times, or four, and others when he might sit listless and indifferent, and get up from his office chair heavy after hours of silence, saying, “Let’s get out of here.”

Instead of going home to change, sometimes he’d drive to the lake.

“This injection causes contractions,” said the doctor, “and it may expel your trouble. Nobody can promise that it will, and sometimes even if it works you still need a dilation and curettage. The thing actresses in Hollywood describe in the paper as appendicitis.”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make any jokes. I’m only interested in your medical services,” Mimi told him right off, and he saw he wasn’t dealing with a timid little knocked-up factory girl who was grateful, he’d think, for his wit and signal back to him dimly with a smile over the vast separating distances of real grief and danger. Some poor body in trouble from tenderness. […]

“Let’s just keep things professional,” she said.

He said, with offended dark nose holes, “Okay, do you want the injection or not?”

“Well, what the hell do you think I came all this way for, a cold night!”

I thought I might mail Simon the key and let him come after his damned car himself. This angry idea was momentary, however. I drank coffee and looked out into the brilliant first morning of the year. There was a Greek church in the next street of which the onion dome stood in the snow-polished and purified blue, cross and crown together, the united powers of earth and heaven, snow in all the clefts, a snow like the sand of sugar. I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn’t see more beautiful color than this.

I was never before so taken up with a single human being. […]

What I did at times realize was how I was abandoning some mighty old protections which now stood empty. Hadn’t I been warned enough because of my mother, and on my own account? With terrible warnings? Look out! Oh, you chump and weak fool, you are one of a humanity that can’t be numbered and not more than the dust of metals scattered in a magnetic field and clinging to the lines of force, determined by laws, eating, sleeping, employed, conveyed, obedient, and subject. So why hunt for still more ways to lose liberty? Why go toward, and not instead run from, the huge drag that threatens to wear out your ribs, rub away your face, splinter your teeth? No, stay away!

Meanwhile the clouds, birds, cattle in the water, things, stayed at their distance, and there was no need to herd, account for, hold them in the head, but it was enough to be among them, released on the ground as they were in their brook or in their air. I meant something like this when I said occasionally I could look out like a creature. […] For, should I look into any air, I could recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El pillars—such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are—like a terrible conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshippers crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel that I myself was a creation of such places. How is it that human beings will submit to the gyps of history while mere creatures look with their original eyes?

Some [of the lizards] soon became tame. You stroked them on the little head with a finger and they got affectionate, up your sleeve or on your shoulder, into your hair. At night, when we were at dinner, I’d stare at the ones that lay near the bug-attracting lights, with swift puff of the throat and their tongues which are supposed to have the power to hear. I wished we could leave them alone, thinking of that thunderous animal whose weight was on the toilet cistern, with his ripping feet and back. About this Thea was both gay and sharp with me, and when she argued against my sympathy with those gilded Hyperion’s kids made me laugh and also squirm.

[…] She said, “Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up with everything, like a savage.”

And even after the scratches healed and the headaches dimmed down I was gnawed and didn’t know from what cause. Thea also became very restless. Caligula’s washout and my being such a chump as to spur poor Bizcocho from the very top of a bluff terribly disappointed her. With her eagerness and boldness, that she should be held back by my incompetence after having undertaken this, planned it out, mastered the animal, was very hard to take. Thea sent Caligula away to her father’s friend in Indiana […] I hobbled out to see the eagle, caged and crated, loaded on the wagon. The white patch of maturity was beginning to show on his head; the eye wasn’t a bit less imperial and his beak with its naked purposes of breathing and tearing just as awesome as before.

She stabbed me hard with this, and suffered as she did so. I knew I’d bleed a long time from it. I grabbed and gave an inhuman twist to the crank. The kick of the motor tore at my arms, and I jumped to the wheel. In the headlights I saw Thea’s dress; she was standing still and probably waiting to see what I would do. My real desire was to get out. But already the car had gone a way over the cobbles and it seemed to me that having just got it under way I couldn’t check it. That’s so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.

External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can’t get justice and he can’t give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It’s made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that’s what their power is. […] That’s the real struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and flowers of a version.

But she anyhow arrived at the opinion that she wanted. In her fur-trimmed suit, large and handsome, she was like an office of the court all right, even though her lips were painted and eyes mascaraed. […]

The one thing that disturbed her was that without having a cent I seemed perfectly at home with many of the satisfactions that the rich enjoy. Free of charge and trouble. It wasn’t true, of course, but only another one of those appearances. However, she was particularly concerned that I didn’t at least look more anxious.

At dinner I wanted to talk about Georgie with Simon […]

“Why worry about your brother George when you haven’t decided what to do with your own life?” said Charlotte. “It’s very easy to turn into a bum.”

“I went to the Mottley School in the fourth grade. Mrs. Minsick was the teacher. She’d call you up to the front of the class and hand you a piece of chalk. ‘Now, Dorabella, what are you going to smell?’ […] This little Dorabella Feingold would smell up until her pants showed […] She’d say ‘Sweetpea.’ It was a regular drill. […] Well, the wild kids would say, ‘Skunk cabbage, teach,’ or, ‘Wild schmooflowers,’ or ‘Dreck.’ […] But these tough kids were right. Whoever saw any sweetpeas? […]”

“This is a sad story. But don’t you see that both kinds of kids were right? Some stood up for what they knew and some longed for what they didn’t. What do you mean, that there are some kids or people for whom there can’t be flowers? That couldn’t be true.”

I have a feeling […] about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said ‘no’ like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders […] When striving stops, there they are as a gift. […] And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quiet and wait it out. […] He will be brought into focus. He will live with true joy. Even his pains will be joy if they are true, even his helplessness will not take away his power, even wandering will not take him away from himself […].

You may be as interested as I was, though, in what a clever fellow once said to be about the connection of love and adultery. On any certain day, when you’re happy, you know it can’t last, but the weather will change, the health will be sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day there’ll be a different lover. The face you’re kissing will change to some other face and so will your face be replaced. It can’t be helped, this guy said. […] But love is adultery, he said, and express change. You make your peace with change. […] You kiss the woman and you show how you love your fate, and you worship and adore the changes of life. You obey this law. Whether or not this bum was right, may God hate his soul! don’t think you don’t have to obey the laws of life.

Even in a few minutes’ conversation, do you realize how many times what you say is converted before it comes out as what you say? Somebody tells you A. Your response is B. B you can’t say, so you transform it, you put it through the coils of your breast. […] So instead of B there comes out gamma sub one. […] Mind you, I’m a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the genius of the race. But a large part of his genius is devoted to lying and seeming what you are not. We love when this man Ulysses comes back in disguise for his revenge. But suppose he forgot what he came back for and just sat around day in, day out in the disguise. This happens to many a frail spirit who forgets what the disguises are for, doesn’t understand complexity, or how to return to simplicity.

I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character was his fate. Well, then, it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character. And since I never have had any place of rest, it should follow that I have trouble being still, and furthermore my hope is based upon getting to be still so that the axial lines can be found. When striving stops, the truth comes as a gift—bounty, harmony, love, and so forth. Maybe I can’t take these very things I want.

“I love her,” I said.

As if that was an answer! But how could you blame me if I was unwilling to say more to Frazer? Suppose I started to explain that she loved me too, but loved me in the way that Paris is the City of Man, or with what she brought to it, given her preoccupations […] I wasn’t going to go into all this with Frazer. When I took it up with Stella, and once in a while I did, or tried to, I seemed to sound like a fanatic, and maybe sounded to her as other people had to me, sounding off about their ide that they were trying to sell or recruit you for. This made her a mirror, like, where I could see my own obstinacy of yore and how it must have looked when I balked.